Shayler was head of the Libyan section in MI5 from Oct 94 - Oct 96. He was therefore responsible for looking at the claims made by The Maltese Doublecross when it came out. I remember he spent weeks going through all the evidence and intelligence held on the Lockerbie case, and came to the conclusion that Libya was indeed behind the attack.

There IS a conspiracy here - it is that MI6 has been pushing the line that it was an Iranian-backed group which carried out the attack. This line has been spread by their stooges in the MSM, and recently resurfaced when a former senior police officer went public about his concerns there had been a miscarriage of justice, and that the Iranians had sponsored the attack. The timing of this claim was interesting - the officer had waited until last year to make this claim, and did so at a time when Western governments were trying to ramp up the threat of Iran as a pretext for an attack.

All the detailed info about this is in my book, "Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers". I'm not trying to flog it - get it out of a library!

Regards

Annie Machon_________________All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing - Edmund Burke.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem Americanam appellant - Tacitus Redactus.

We've been here before Annie. i don't think you or David [who i asked about Lockerbie in person] are being deliberately deceitful on this issue but it may be one worth shifting your response[s] on.

My take is that the higher levels of the CIA and MI5/6 had this one prepared and ready and that the "documentation" seen by David focused on Libya for this purpose. Vincent Cannistraro et al were brought onboard to move the story to Libya and Mi5/6 towed the line for whatever reason. When you wade through the data it's impossible to come to any other conclusion - the ludicrous 'finding' of the timer device and the trail this involves is but one piece of the whole farce designed to frame innocent parties. There's also far more going on here than some terrorists managing to get a bomb on board a plane.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Annie: One point I'd like to ask :

In your book you state that in April 1998 you and David were taken to examine documentation supposedly related to the Diana case but you realised these were forgeries and made the case that Al Fayed could have been set-up at a future date using these items to discredit him.

We have indeed been here before. Shayler didn't just go through the files, he also spent a lot of time with Dumfries and Galloway police, and build up an excellent relationship with them. He was shown all the physical evidence, and it was obvious that the timer was part of the bomb.

Also, you say MI5/6 pushed the Libyan line. Absolutely not. MI6 were the ones spreading the word that the Iranians were behind Lockerbie, and waged a vicious Whitehall and media campaign against MI5, the police and the foreign intelligence agencies that had worked on the investigation. This may merely have been to save face - after all, soon after the attack they told the government that it was the Iranians on the word of one uncorroborated source (shades of the Iraq war, anyone?), but it was and also remains politically expedient to blame the Iranian regime.

Regards

Annie x_________________All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing - Edmund Burke.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem Americanam appellant - Tacitus Redactus.

We have indeed been here before. Shayler didn't just go through the files, he also spent a lot of time with Dumfries and Galloway police, and build up an excellent relationship with them. He was shown all the physical evidence, and it was obvious that the timer was part of the bomb.

Also, you say MI5/6 pushed the Libyan line. Absolutely not. MI6 were the ones spreading the word that the Iranians were behind Lockerbie, and waged a vicious Whitehall and media campaign against MI5, the police and the foreign intelligence agencies that had worked on the investigation. This may merely have been to save face - after all, soon after the attack they told the government that it was the Iranians on the word of one uncorroborated source (shades of the Iraq war, anyone?), but it was and also remains politically expedient to blame the Iranian regime.

Regards

Annie x

What is your best/any evidence Libya perpetrated the bombing of PanAm103?
So far I've seen none.

The case of the only man found guilty of the Lockerbie bombing, Britain's biggest terrorist outrage that killed 270 people, could be reopened after fresh evidence that his conviction was based on unreliable evidence.

If the appeal is successful, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi could walk free.

Senior legal and intelligence officials have told The Observer that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission will conclude that the conviction of al-Megrahi is unsafe and that he may have been a victim of a miscarriage of justice.

Article continues
The commission's verdict follows a three-year inquiry that examined new evidence submitted by Megrahi's legal team. They registered concern over the testimony of expert witnesses, contradictory forensic evidence and vital material not aired at the trial.

They say in their 500-page report that the new evidence casts reasonable doubt on the verdict that Megrahi was responsible for the bombing of Pan-Am flight 103 four days before Christmas 1988.

Sources close to the commission, an independent body made up of senior police and legal figures set up to investigate alleged miscarriages of justice, said 'hundreds' of inconsistencies have been uncovered in the crown's case. Megrahi, 54, received a life sentence in 2001 for plotting and carrying out what was then the world's worst terrorist atrocity following a trial costing £80m at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands. Megrahi has always insisted he was innocent. The development suggests that the perpetrators responsible for blowing up the airliner over Lockerbie might remain free almost 20 years after the attack.

The commission will refer the case to the High Court in Edinburgh on appeal in 10 days' time, where it is expected that the conviction will either be quashed or that Megrahi could face a retrial. Although the court has the power to uphold Megrahi's conviction, sources believe the weight of evidence examined by the commission suggest this is unlikely.

Major concerns with the crown's case include:

· Credibility of the key forensic scientists used by the prosecution during Megrahi's trial.

· Inconsistencies of statements made by the Maltese shopkeeper who allegedly sold Megrahi clothes found scattered around Lockerbie.

· New evidence not presented at the trial pointed away from Libyan involvement and towards Palestinian terrorists as those responsible for the atrocity.

Megrahi has served seven years in British custody. During sentencing he was told he must serve at least 27 years before being considered for release.

Politically the ramifications of the commission's decision are enormous, posing questions for both British investigators and the Scottish judicial system. In addition, the decision will add succour to the theories that Megrahi was framed for a crime he never committed.

Named in a 400-page report of evidence collated by Megrahi's seven-strong legal team are those suspected of carrying out the attack. Among them is Mohammed Abu Talb, a convicted Palestinian terrorist and initial suspect for the Lockerbie bombing. He was a member of the Syrian-led Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, a terrorist group backed by Iranian funding. The claims will raise the political stakes at a sensitive time in relations between the West and Iran.

Following Megrahi's trial, a number of legal observers expressed unease over the 'circumstantial' nature of the case against the Libyan intelligence officer.

A legal source who has seen the evidence collated by Megrahi's team said: 'The case was flaky and you only had to shake it a bit for it to start falling apart. A steamroller has been taken to it'.

Named in the commission's report are individuals that lawyers believe should have faced trial instead of Megrahi. Among them are Talb and another man who is a former member of the Libyan intelligence service .

Quote:

Evidence that casts doubt on who brought down Flight 103

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi never wavered in his denial of causing the Lockerbie disaster: now Scottish legal experts say they believe him

Mark Townsend and David Smith
Sunday June 17, 2007
The Observer

It was 6.04pm on a wintry evening when Pan-Am Flight 103 pushed back from the gate at Heathrow Airport. Twenty-four minutes later, the plane was airborne, flying north-west in a familiar routine. As it approached the Scottish border it reached a cruising altitude of 31,000 feet.

There were 259 people on board. They included 189 Americans, most of them heading home to spend the holidays with family and friends. It was four days before Christmas.

Article continues
At 7.03pm, contact between the New York-bound Boeing 747 and Prestwick Airport near Glasgow was lost. The pilot of another aircraft trailing the Boeing saw a ball of orange flame light up the night sky before him. Half a minute later, wreckage from Pan-Am Flight 103, ripped apart by a Semtex bomb, crashed onto a row of houses in the market town of Lockerbie.

Two hundred and seventy people died, including 11 residents of the Dumfriesshire town, as burning lumps of the 300-tonne plane fell from the sky. The 1988 tragedy constituted the worst terrorist atrocity in British aviation history and sparked the biggest murder investigation in British legal history.

Nineteen years later, Lockerbie, like Hungerford, Dunblane and Soham, is still synonymous with a single tragic day, one which remains Britain's worst terrorist disaster. It was also the deadliest attack on American civilians until four hijacked airliners shook the country on 11 September 2001.

At first, suspicion for the Lockerbie bombing fell on the Syrian-led Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, a terrorist group backed by Iranian funding. Then there was speculation it was linked to the 1991 Gulf War, which profoundly altered diplomatic relations with the Middle East and cast Libya, led by Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, in the role of a pariah state.

But in 1991 the Lockerbie inquiry's focus intensified on Tripoli. Indictments for murder were issued against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer and the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), and Lamin Khalifah Fahima, the LAA station manager in Luqa Airport, Malta. Eight years later, after protracted negotiations with Gadaffi, and United Nations sanctions against Libya, the pair were finally handed over to Scottish police at a neutral venue, Camp Zeist in the Netherlands.

The trial - under Scottish law and before three judges, not a jury - was a long and painful experience for the families of the victims, whose names were read out, one by one, at its opening.

In January 2001, Megrahi was convicted of murder by the panel of judges, and sentenced to 27 years in prison. Fahima was acquitted. The families expressed their relief that closure had been achieved. But Megrahi insisted he was innocent of the crime and would fight for his freedom. His application to the European Court of Human Rights to appeal against his conviction was declared inadmissible. In September 2003 Megrahi, serving his sentence in Greenock Prison near Glasgow, turned to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in the hope that his case would be referred back to the High Court for a fresh appeal.

Megrahi's legal team has submitted evidence to the SCCRC contending there are major flaws in the case against him. The SCCRC will announce its ruling next week.

The vital evidence that linked Megrahi to the bombing of Pan-Am 103 was a tiny fragment of circuit board found in a wooded area 25 miles from Lockerbie six months after the atrocity. Crucial to the prosecution's case was the use of expert witnesses to make the link between Megrahi and the circuit board timer which was said to have been part of the bomb's detonator.

Evidence considered by the commission cast doubt on the credibility of the three key forensic scientists used by the prosecution during the trial to make the connection between the timer and Megrahi. One of these, Allen Feraday, also gave evidence against defendants who have since had their convictions quashed. After one case, in July 2005, the Lord Chief Justice said Feraday should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in the field of electronics. Lord Woolf ruled that the conviction of Hassan Assali, 53, on terrorist conspiracy charges was unsound.

Another of the scientists who gave evidence in the trial, Dr Thomas Hayes, was involved in the case of the Maguire Seven, imprisoned in 1976 for handling explosives shortly after the Guildford bombings. They also won their appeal after major flaws in forensic science.

The involvement of a third expert witness has also been called into question. The FBI's Thomas Thurman identified the fragment of circuit board as part of a sophisticated timer device used to detonate explosives and as manufactured by Swedish firm Mebo, which supplied the component only to Libya and the East German Stasi. At one point Megrahi was such a regular visitor to Mebo that he had his own office in the firm's headquarters. The testimony enabled Libya - and Megrahi - to be placed at the centre of the investigation. Thurman, however, has subsequently been accused of doctoring scientific reports.

Megrahi's legal team claim that the forensics case provided by the prosecution was taken at face value. 'It transpired that there was never any chemical analysis, no swabbing for the gaseous reaction that would indicate whether the circuit board had survived an explosion. It was all visual, for instance that it looked a bit charred, and all on the say of experts,' said a legal source close to the investigation, adding that such a process of forensic analysis is unheard of in criminal trials.

In addition, one of the strongest pieces of evidence in the prosecution case was the testimony of Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci. He identified Megrahi as the man who bought the clothing wrapped around the bomb and later found scattered in the countryside around Lockerbie. The clothing was traced by police to Malta. Documents seen by the commission reveal that Gauci was interviewed by Scottish and Maltese police 17 times during which he gave a series of inconsistent statements.

A legal source said: 'A key witness who could be proven to be so unreliable is more than sufficient to collapse any trial. Plus there was evidence of leading questions put to Gauci, a practice then known to distort evidence.'

The commission's 500-page report is unlikely to be made public - only an executive summary will be published. Even then, perhaps, the questions will linger about who caused Flight 103 to became a ball of orange flame in the night sky above Lockerbie that would never reach its destination.

Lockerbie: the years of controversy

21 December 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York blows up over Lockerbie four days before Christmas, killing 270 people.

14 November 1991 United States and Britain accuse Libyans Abdel Megrahi and Amin Fahima of involvement in bombing the jumbo jet.

11 March 2003 Libya accepts civil responsibility for the bombing and pays up to $10m (£5m) per victim.

May 2003 Megrahi launches fresh appeal, citing new evidence.

15 August 2003 Libya tells UN it was responsible for the bombing.

24 November 2003 Megrahi told he must serve 27 years before applying for parole.

13 June 2007 First Minister Alex Salmond writes to Tony Blair protesting about memorandum of understanding signed with Libya. Salmond complains his government is not being consulted about eventual prisoner transfer.

Another piece in todays news. This is a good background/update piece having skimmed through it. As usual though it casts some ideas as 'outlandish' conspiracies even though some aspects of the case go much deeper than they have mentioned.

From the London Review of Books, largely repeated in the Sunday Times (Scotland) 17/6/07

This was forwarded to me by Jim Swire:

Quote:

Inconvenient Truths

On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was 38 minutes into its journey when it was blown up at 31,000 feet. The explosion was so powerful that the nose of the aircraft was torn clean off. Within three seconds of the bomb detonating, the cockpit, fuselage and No. 3 engine were falling separately out of the sky. It happened so quickly that no distress call was sent out and no oxygen masks deployed. With the cockpit gone, the fuselage depressurised instantly and the passengers in the rear section of the aircraft found themselves staring out into the Scottish night air. Anyone or anything not strapped down was whipped out of the plane; the change in air pressure made the passengers’ lungs expand to four times their normal volume and everyone lost consciousness. As the fuselage plummeted and the air pressure began to return to normal, some passengers came round, including the captain. A few survived all the way down, until they hit the ground. Rescuers found them clutching crucifixes, or holding hands, still strapped into their seats.

The fuselage of the plane landed on a row of family houses in the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. The impact was so powerful that the British Geological Survey registered a seismic event measuring 1.6 on the Richter scale. The wing section of the Boeing 747, loaded with enough fuel for a transatlantic flight, hit the ground at more than 500 miles an hour and exploded in a fireball that lit the sky. The cockpit, with the first-class section still attached, landed beside a church in the village of Tundergarth.

Over the next few days rescuers made a fingertip search of the crash site: 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 people on the ground had been killed. Bodies and debris were strewn along an 81-mile corridor of Scottish countryside. Ten thousand pieces of debris were retrieved; each was meticulously logged. Among the items recovered were the remains of a Samsonite suitcase, which investigators later established had been used to transport the bomb. The suitcase had contained clothes, clothes that were subsequently traced to the shop of a Maltese man called Tony Gauci. Gauci later became a key prosecution witness. Fragments of a circuit board and a Toshiba radio were also recovered and identified as parts of the bomb.

Twelve years later, on 31 January 2001, a panel of three Scottish judges convicted a former Libyan intelligence officer for mass murder at Lockerbie. Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was tried at a specially convened court on a former US air force base near the Dutch town of Zeist. Under a special international arrangement, the court, which sat without a jury, was temporarily declared sovereign territory of the United Kingdom, under the jurisdiction of Scottish law.

Al-Megrahi is still the only person to have been found guilty in connection with the attack. He was sentenced to 27 years in jail. His co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, a fellow Libyan intelligence officer, was acquitted. Al-Megrahi was initially told that he would spend at least twenty years in prison, but the Crown, which was prosecuting, protested that this sentence was unduly lenient and petitioned the judges for a longer one. In 2003 the judges reconvened to rule that he must serve no less than 27 years before the parole board would consider his eligibility for release. Al-Megrahi’s defence team had already lodged an appeal against the conviction, but in March 2002 the guilty verdict was upheld.

From the outset the Lockerbie disaster has been marked by superlatives. The bombing was the deadliest terror attack on American civilians until 11 September 2001. It sparked Britain’s biggest ever criminal inquiry, led by its smallest police force, Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary. It spelled the end of Pan Am, which never recovered from the damage to its reputation. The trial at Camp Zeist was the longest and – at a cost of £75 million – the most expensive in Scottish legal history. The appeal hearing was the first Scottish trial to be broadcast live on both television and the internet.

Lawyers, politicians, diplomats and relatives of Lockerbie victims now believe that the former Libyan intelligence officer is innocent. Robert Black QC, an emeritus professor of Scottish law at Edinburgh University, was one of the architects of the original trial in Holland. He has closely followed developments since the disaster happened and in 2000 devised the non-jury trial system for the al-Megrahi case.

Even before the trial he was so sure the evidence against al-Megrahi would not stand up in court that he is on record as saying that a conviction would be impossible. When I asked how he feels about this remark now, Black replied: ‘I am still absolutely convinced that I am right. No reasonable tribunal, on the evidence heard at the original trial, should or could have convicted him and it is an absolute disgrace and outrage what the Scottish court did.’

Al-Megrahi lost his appeal in 2002, but under Scottish law he is entitled to a further legal review, to be conducted by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), an independent public body made up of senior police officers and lawyers. Its job is to re-examine cases where a miscarriage of justice may have occurred: it handles cases after the appeal process has been exhausted, and if it finds evidence that a miscarriage of justice may have taken place it refers the case to the High Court to be heard again. Al-Megrahi applied to the SCCRC for a review of his case in 2003 and the commission has been reinspecting evidence from the trial for the last four years. It will submit its findings at the end of June. It looks likely that the SCCRC will find that there is enough evidence to refer al-Megrahi’s case back to the appeal court. The Crown Office has already begun reinforcing its Lockerbie legal team in anticipation of a referral.

If al-Megrahi is granted a second appeal, it will, like the original trial, be held before a panel of Scottish judges, without a jury. This time the trial will take place in Scotland, and if the glacial pace of proceedings in the past is anything to go by, it will probably not be heard before the summer of 2008. Al-Megrahi’s defence team would be ready to launch an appeal in a matter of weeks, but the prosecution would be likely to delay the hearing for as long as possible. If an appeal takes place, al-Megrahi’s defence team will produce important evidence that was not available at the time of the first appeal, evidence that seems likely not only to exonerate al-Megrahi but to do so by pointing the finger of blame at the real perpetrators of the Lockerbie bombing and revealing some inconvenient truths.

Even the judge who presided over the Lockerbie investigation and issued the 1991 arrest warrants for the two Libyans has cast doubt on the prosecution’s case. In an interview with the Sunday Times in October 2005, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, Scotland’s larger-than-life lord advocate from 1989 to 1992, questioned the reliability of the shopkeeper Tony Gauci, the prosecution’s star witness. ‘Gauci was not quite the full shilling. I think even his family would say [that he] was an apple short of a picnic. He was quite a tricky guy, I don’t think he was deliberately lying but if you asked him the same question three times he would just get irritated and refuse to answer.’ Lord Fraser made it clear that this did not mean he thought al-Megrahi was innocent. But he had presented Gauci as a reliable witness; he went on to become the heart of the prosecution’s case. Now he was casting doubt on the man who identified al-Megrahi.

Since al-Megrahi’s last appeal, many thousands of pages of reports, detailing freight and baggage movements in and out of Frankfurt airport, have been handed over to the defence. Largely in German and many handwritten, the papers were translated by the Crown at the taxpayer’s expense, but the Crown refused to share the translations with the defence and left it no time to commission its own. The Privy Council’s judicial committee, made up of law lords and senior judges, has declared that the Crown’s refusal to disclose this evidence is a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. More damaging still, an unnamed senior British police officer – known to be a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (ACPOS), which implies that his rank is assistant chief constable or higher – has testfied to al-Megrahi’s defence team that crucial evidence at the trial was fabricated. If the SCCRC finds that the prosecution played foul, the Crown may decide it would be better not to continue with its case, allowing al-Megrahi to be freed immediately.

This anonymous senior officer’s testimony chimes with the well-trodden theory that the American government had a hand in fixing the trial. Hans Köchler, the UN observer at Camp Zeist, reported at the time that the trial was politically charged and the verdict ‘totally incomprehensible’.

In his report Köchler wrote that he found the presence of US Justice Department representatives in the court ‘highly problematic’, because it gave the impression that they were ‘“supervisors” handling vital matters of the prosecution strategy and deciding . . . which documents . . . were to be released in open court and what parts of information contained in a certain document were to be withheld.’ ‘The alternative theory of the defence,’ he went on, ‘was never seriously investigated. Amid shrouds of secrecy and national security considerations, that avenue was never seriously pursued – although it was officially declared as being of major importance for the defence case. This is totally incomprehensible to any rational observer.’ The prosecution, Köchler noted, dismissed evidence on the grounds that it was not relevant; but now that that evidence has finally – partially – been released, it turns out to be very relevant indeed: to the defence.

Whatever happens, al-Megrahi may not have to wait long. As soon as a further appeal is scheduled, he can make an application to be released from custody: the convicted Lockerbie bomber, who was supposed to serve no fewer than 27 years in a Scottish jail, might well be free this summer. Whether al-Megrahi is freed pending his appeal – and what conditions would be applied if he were – depends largely on whether his defence team can convince the judge that he is not a flight risk. This may be hard to do. The judge might decide that if he left the country, he might choose to stay in Libya rather than come back next year for another round in court. If al-Megrahi is exonerated, many tricky questions will resurface, not least what to do about the $2.7 billion compensation paid by Libya to the relatives of the victims of the bombing. And then, of course, there is the question of who really bombed Flight 103.

In the first three years following the bombing, before a shred of evidence had been produced to incriminate Libya, the Dumfries and Galloway police, the FBI and several other intelligence services around the world all shared the belief that the Lockerbie bombers belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC), a Palestinian rejectionist organisation backed by Iran. The PFLP-GC is headed by Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian army captain; its headquarters are in Damascus and it is closely allied with the Syrian president and other senior Syrian officials. In the 1970s and 1980s the PFLP-GC carried out a number of raids against Israel, including a novel hang-glider assault launched from inside Lebanon. Lawyers, intelligence services and diplomats around the world continue to suspect that Jibril – who has even boasted that he is responsible – was behind Lockerbie.

The case against Jibril and his gang is well established. It runs like this: in July 1988, five months before the Lockerbie bombing, a US naval commander aboard USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian airbus, apparently mistaking it for an attacker. On board Iran Air Flight 655 were 270 pilgrims en route to Mecca. Ayatollah Khomeini vowed the skies would ‘rain blood’ in revenge and offered a $10 million reward to anyone who ‘obtained justice’ for Iran. The suggestion is that the PFLP-GC was commissioned to undertake a retaliatory bombing.

We know at least that two months before Lockerbie, a PFLP-GC cell was active in the Frankfurt and Neuss areas of West Germany. On 26 October 1998, German police arrested 17 terrorist suspects who, surveillance showed, had cased Frankfurt airport and browsed Pan Am flight timetables. Four Semtex-based explosive devices were confiscated; a fifth is known to have gone missing. They were concealed inside Toshiba radios very similar to the one found at Lockerbie a few weeks later. One of the gang, a Palestinian known as Abu Talb, was later found to have a calendar in his flat in Sweden with the date of 21 December circled. New evidence, now in the hands of al-Megrahi’s defence, proves for the first time that Abu Talb was in Malta when the Lockerbie bombing took place. The Maltese man whose testimony convicted al-Megrahi has also identified Abu Talb. During al-Megrahi’s trial Abu Talb had a strange role. As part of a defence available in Scottish law, known as ‘incrimination’, Abu Talb was named as someone who – rather than the accused – might have carried out the bombing. At the time he was serving a life sentence in Sweden for the bombing of a synagogue, but he was summoned to Camp Zeist to give evidence. He ended up testifying as a prosecution witness, denying that he had anything to do with Lockerbie. In exchange for his testimony, he received lifelong immunity from prosecution.

Other evidence has emerged showing that the bomb could have been placed on the plane at Frankfurt airport, a possibility that the prosecution in al-Megrahi’s trial consistently ruled out (their case depended on the suitcase containing the bomb having been transferred from a connecting flight from Malta). Most significantly, German federal police have provided financial records showing that on 23 December 1988, two days after the bombing, the Iranian government deposited £5.9 million into a Swiss bank account that belonged to the arrested members of the PFLP-GC.

The decision to steer the investigation away from the PFLP-GC and in the direction of Libya came in the run-up to the first Gulf War, as America was looking to rally a coalition to liberate Kuwait and was calling for support from Iran and Syria. Syria subsequently joined the UN forces. Quietly, the evidence incriminating Jibril, so painstakingly sifted from the debris, was binned.

Those who continued to press the case against the PFLP-GC seemed to fall foul of American law. When a New York corporate investigative company asked to look into the bombing on behalf of Pan Am found the PFLP-GC responsible, the federal government promptly indicted the company’s president, Juval Aviv, for mail fraud. Lester Coleman, a former Defense Intelligence Agency operative who was researching a book about the PFLP-GC and Lockerbie, was charged by the FBI with ‘falsely procuring a passport’. William Casey, a lobbyist who made similar allegations in 1995, found his bank accounts frozen and federal agents searching through his trash. Even so, documents leaked from the US Defense Intelligence Agency in 1995, two years after the Libyans were first identified as the prime suspects, still blamed the PFLP-GC.

Suspicions and conspiracy theories have swirled around Lockerbie from the beginning. Some of them are fairly outlandish. In Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse (2005), Brigid Keenan, the wife of the British diplomat Alan Waddams, reported that over dinner in Gambia, a former Interpol agent told her and her husband that the bombing had been a revenge attack by Iran, in retaliation for the downed airliner (though she didn’t say how he knew this). The Interpol agent claimed the cargo had not been checked because the plane was carrying drugs as part of a deal over American hostages held by Hizbullah in Beirut. Militant groups were being allowed to smuggle heroin into the US in exchange for information; the bomb had gone on board when the PFLP-GC found a loophole in this drug-running operation.

At least four US intelligence officers, including the CIA’s deputy station chief in Beirut, were on the Flight 103 passenger list. In the days following the bombing, CIA agents scoured the Scottish countryside, some reportedly dressed in Pan Am overalls. Mary Boylan, then a constable with Lothian and Borders police, has said that senior police officers told her not to make an official record of the CIA badge she recovered from the wreckage, asking her instead to hand it over to a senior colleague. Her testimony, too, is now in the hands of the SCCRC. Jim Wilson, a farmer from the village of Tundergarth, reported shortly after the bombing that he had found in his field a suitcase packed with a powdery substance that looked ‘like drugs’. He last saw the suitcase when he handed it over to the police, he said; he was never asked about it again.

In December 1998, Susan Lindauer, a US congressional aide, submitted a sworn deposition to the court in which she claimed that Richard Fuisz, a CIA agent, had given her a guarantee that he knew who was behind the Lockerbie bombing. Lindauer’s affidavit describes a conversation in Fuisz’s ‘business office’ in Chantilly, Virginia, in which he said he knew for sure the perpetrators were based in Syria. ‘Dr Fuisz has told me that he can identify who orchestrated and executed the bombing. Dr Fuisz has said that he can confirm absolutely that no Libyan national was involved in planning or executing the bombing of Pan Am 103, either in any technical or advisory capacity whatsoever.’ ‘If the government would let me, I could identify the men behind this attack,’ Lindauer says Fuisz told her. Lindauer has since been accused by the US government of being an Iraqi agent; her case is pending. But her earlier deposition has been submitted to the SCCRC. It can’t count for much, however, since Fuisz himself is not able to comment. In October 1994, a month after Lindauer spoke to him, Fuisz was gagged by a Washington court. The US government ruled that under state secrecy laws he faced ten years in prison if he spoke about the Lockerbie bombing. UN observers have since criticised this apparent restraint of a key witness.

When Libya handed al-Megrahi over for trial, sanctions on Libya authorised by the Security Council were suspended and diplomatic relations with Britain restored. Tony Blair claims the Libyan detente was one of his most important foreign policy victories, and last month, as the long shadow began to fall across his premiership, Blair swung by Tripoli to meet again with Libya’s leader. Gaddafi has always contested that al-Megrahi is not the Lockerbie bomber and that he should be allowed to return home. Maybe the two leaders touched on the prickly topic of what should be done about the compensation paid by Libya, in the event al-Megrahi is exonerated. When al-Megrahi was handed over for trial, Libya declared that it would accept responsibility for his actions. But it never accepted guilt. This distinction was spelled out clearly in Libyan letters to the UN Security Council. In a BBC radio interview in 2004, the Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, underlined once again that compensation had been paid because this was the ‘price for peace’ and to secure the lifting of sanctions. When asked if Libya did not accept guilt, he said: ‘I agree with that.’

If the court that convicted al-Megrahi now reverses its decision, then Libya would clearly have a case for demanding its money back. Since recovering the compensation from the relatives would be unthinkable, it is more likely Libya would pursue those responsible for the miscarriage of justice. ‘What they might try to do,’ Black suggests, ‘is to recoup the money from the British and American governments, who after all are responsible for the initial farce and the wrongful conviction in the first place. They paid that money on the basis of a miscarriage of justice perpetrated by the British courts.’ Al-Megrahi’s acquittal on appeal would not ipso facto make a compelling case for Libya to have its money back: even if guilt can’t be proved beyond reasonable doubt – the test of the criminal burden of proof – it could still be shown that it was more likely than not (which is the burden applied to civil cases such as compensation cases). If Libya paid the money for purely political reasons then, one could argue, it might have to live with that decision. When I asked the Foreign Office whether Britain would consider reimbursing Libya in the event of al-Megrahi’s exoneration, a spokesman declined to comment.

If al-Megrahi is acquitted, he will also have the right to sue for wrongful conviction. He could claim compensation to the tune of several tens of thousands of pounds. The Crown Office, which is headed by the Scottish lord advocate, is responsible for what happened, which means that al-Megrahi would sue the Scottish Executive. The lord advocate is now one of the ‘Scottish ministers’, whereas previously he – now she – was one of the law officers of the UK Government. The Scottish Executive might refuse to pay, blaming Westminster. Westminster, meanwhile, would argue that Lockerbie is and always has been a Crown Office matter and that the UK government has no say. A political storm is on its way, especially now that the SNP is in charge in Scotland.

Since the case against al-Megrahi was so weak, it is hard to understand how the judges who presided over the trial could have got it so wrong. Black has a view:

<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">It has been suggested to me, very often by Libyans, that political pressure was placed upon the judges. I don’t think for a minute that political pressure of that nature was placed on the judges. What happened, I think, was that it was internal politics in Scotland. Prosecutions in Scotland are brought by the lord advocate. Until just a few years ago, one of the other functions of the lord advocate in Scotland was that he appointed all Scottish judges. I think what influenced these judges was that they thought that if both of the Libyans accused are found not guilty, this will be the most fiendish embarrassment to the lord advocate.</BLOCKQUOTE>

The appointment system for judges has changed since the trial, but another controversial aspect of the al-Megrahi case may also be re-examined: the policies on disclosure. Compared to almost any other similar criminal justice system, Scotland does not have a proper system of disclosure of information. In England and Wales, the Crown has to disclose all material to the defence, according to rules set out in statute. In Scotland the Crown is allowed to modify or withhold evidence if it considers that withholding is in the ‘public interest’. At least the Scottish criminal justice system doesn’t have the death penalty.
Hugh Miles has lived in Libya, Egypt and Yemen. He works in London.

Even the judge who presided over the Lockerbie investigation and issued the 1991 arrest warrants for the two Libyans has cast doubt on the prosecution’s case.

In an interview with the Sunday Times in October 2005, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, Scotland’s larger-than-life lord advocate from 1989 to 1992, questioned the reliability of the shopkeeper Tony Gauci, the prosecution’s star witness. ‘Gauci was not quite the full shilling. I think even his family would say [that he] was an apple short of a picnic. He was quite a tricky guy,

In December 1998, Susan Lindauer, a US congressional aide, submitted a sworn deposition to the court in which she claimed that Richard Fuisz, a CIA agent, had given her a guarantee that he knew who was behind the Lockerbie bombing.

‘If the government would let me, I could identify the men behind this attack,’ In October 1994, a month after Lindauer spoke to him, Fuisz was gagged by a Washington court.

The US government ruled that under state secrecy laws he faced ten years in prison if he spoke about the Lockerbie bombing. UN observers have since criticised this apparent restraint of a key witness.

.

So the prosecution relies on an oddball as its main witness, and someone else with contradictory evidence faces ten years in prison if he speaks about the lockerbie bombing?

it appears that a 'home run' verdict and result fixing scam is in operation again, suprise suprise.

On 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was 38 minutes into its journey when it was blown up at 31,000 feet. The explosion was so powerful that the nose of the aircraft was torn clean off. Within three seconds of the bomb detonating, the cockpit, fuselage and No. 3 engine were falling separately out of the sky. It happened so quickly that no distress call was sent out and no oxygen masks deployed. With the cockpit gone, the fuselage depressurised instantly and the passengers in the rear section of the aircraft found themselves staring out into the Scottish night air. Anyone or anything not strapped down was whipped out of the plane; the change in air pressure made the passengers’ lungs expand to four times their normal volume and everyone lost consciousness. As the fuselage plummeted and the air pressure began to return to normal, some passengers came round, including the captain. A few survived all the way down, until they hit the ground. Rescuers found them clutching crucifixes, or holding hands, still strapped into their seats.

The fuselage of the plane landed on a row of family houses in the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. The impact was so powerful that the British Geological Survey registered a seismic event measuring 1.6 on the Richter scale. The wing section of the Boeing 747, loaded with enough fuel for a transatlantic flight, hit the ground at more than 500 miles an hour and exploded in a fireball that lit the sky. The cockpit, with the first-class section still attached, landed beside a church in the village of Tundergarth.

Over the next few days rescuers made a fingertip search of the crash site: 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 people on the ground had been killed. Bodies and debris were strewn along an 81-mile corridor of Scottish countryside. Ten thousand pieces of debris were retrieved; each was meticulously logged. Among the items recovered were the remains of a Samsonite suitcase, which investigators later established had been used to transport the bomb. The suitcase had contained clothes, clothes that were subsequently traced to the shop of a Maltese man called Tony Gauci. Gauci later became a key prosecution witness. Fragments of a circuit board and a Toshiba radio were also recovered and identified as parts of the bomb.

Twelve years later, on 31 January 2001, a panel of three Scottish judges convicted a former Libyan intelligence officer for mass murder at Lockerbie. Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was tried at a specially convened court on a former US air force base near the Dutch town of Zeist. Under a special international arrangement, the court, which sat without a jury, was temporarily declared sovereign territory of the United Kingdom, under the jurisdiction of Scottish law.

Al-Megrahi is still the only person to have been found guilty in connection with the attack. He was sentenced to 27 years in jail. His co-accused, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, a fellow Libyan intelligence officer, was acquitted. Al-Megrahi was initially told that he would spend at least twenty years in prison, but the Crown, which was prosecuting, protested that this sentence was unduly lenient and petitioned the judges for a longer one. In 2003 the judges reconvened to rule that he must serve no less than 27 years before the parole board would consider his eligibility for release. Al-Megrahi’s defence team had already lodged an appeal against the conviction, but in March 2002 the guilty verdict was upheld.

From the outset the Lockerbie disaster has been marked by superlatives. The bombing was the deadliest terror attack on American civilians until 11 September 2001. It sparked Britain’s biggest ever criminal inquiry, led by its smallest police force, Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary. It spelled the end of Pan Am, which never recovered from the damage to its reputation. The trial at Camp Zeist was the longest and – at a cost of £75 million – the most expensive in Scottish legal history. The appeal hearing was the first Scottish trial to be broadcast live on both television and the internet.

Lawyers, politicians, diplomats and relatives of Lockerbie victims now believe that the former Libyan intelligence officer is innocent. Robert Black QC, an emeritus professor of Scottish law at Edinburgh University, was one of the architects of the original trial in Holland. He has closely followed developments since the disaster happened and in 2000 devised the non-jury trial system for the al-Megrahi case.

Even before the trial he was so sure the evidence against al-Megrahi would not stand up in court that he is on record as saying that a conviction would be impossible. When I asked how he feels about this remark now, Black replied: ‘I am still absolutely convinced that I am right. No reasonable tribunal, on the evidence heard at the original trial, should or could have convicted him and it is an absolute disgrace and outrage what the Scottish court did.’

Al-Megrahi lost his appeal in 2002, but under Scottish law he is entitled to a further legal review, to be conducted by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), an independent public body made up of senior police officers and lawyers. Its job is to re-examine cases where a miscarriage of justice may have occurred: it handles cases after the appeal process has been exhausted, and if it finds evidence that a miscarriage of justice may have taken place it refers the case to the High Court to be heard again. Al-Megrahi applied to the SCCRC for a review of his case in 2003 and the commission has been reinspecting evidence from the trial for the last four years. It will submit its findings at the end of June. It looks likely that the SCCRC will find that there is enough evidence to refer al-Megrahi’s case back to the appeal court. The Crown Office has already begun reinforcing its Lockerbie legal team in anticipation of a referral.

If al-Megrahi is granted a second appeal, it will, like the original trial, be held before a panel of Scottish judges, without a jury. This time the trial will take place in Scotland, and if the glacial pace of proceedings in the past is anything to go by, it will probably not be heard before the summer of 2008. Al-Megrahi’s defence team would be ready to launch an appeal in a matter of weeks, but the prosecution would be likely to delay the hearing for as long as possible. If an appeal takes place, al-Megrahi’s defence team will produce important evidence that was not available at the time of the first appeal, evidence that seems likely not only to exonerate al-Megrahi but to do so by pointing the finger of blame at the real perpetrators of the Lockerbie bombing and revealing some inconvenient truths.

Even the judge who presided over the Lockerbie investigation and issued the 1991 arrest warrants for the two Libyans has cast doubt on the prosecution’s case. In an interview with the Sunday Times in October 2005, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, Scotland’s larger-than-life lord advocate from 1989 to 1992, questioned the reliability of the shopkeeper Tony Gauci, the prosecution’s star witness. ‘Gauci was not quite the full shilling. I think even his family would say [that he] was an apple short of a picnic. He was quite a tricky guy, I don’t think he was deliberately lying but if you asked him the same question three times he would just get irritated and refuse to answer.’ Lord Fraser made it clear that this did not mean he thought al-Megrahi was innocent. But he had presented Gauci as a reliable witness; he went on to become the heart of the prosecution’s case. Now he was casting doubt on the man who identified al-Megrahi.

Since al-Megrahi’s last appeal, many thousands of pages of reports, detailing freight and baggage movements in and out of Frankfurt airport, have been handed over to the defence. Largely in German and many handwritten, the papers were translated by the Crown at the taxpayer’s expense, but the Crown refused to share the translations with the defence and left it no time to commission its own. The Privy Council’s judicial committee, made up of law lords and senior judges, has declared that the Crown’s refusal to disclose this evidence is a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. More damaging still, an unnamed senior British police officer – known to be a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (ACPOS), which implies that his rank is assistant chief constable or higher – has testfied to al-Megrahi’s defence team that crucial evidence at the trial was fabricated. If the SCCRC finds that the prosecution played foul, the Crown may decide it would be better not to continue with its case, allowing al-Megrahi to be freed immediately.

This anonymous senior officer’s testimony chimes with the well-trodden theory that the American government had a hand in fixing the trial. Hans Köchler, the UN observer at Camp Zeist, reported at the time that the trial was politically charged and the verdict ‘totally incomprehensible’.

In his report Köchler wrote that he found the presence of US Justice Department representatives in the court ‘highly problematic’, because it gave the impression that they were ‘“supervisors” handling vital matters of the prosecution strategy and deciding . . . which documents . . . were to be released in open court and what parts of information contained in a certain document were to be withheld.’ ‘The alternative theory of the defence,’ he went on, ‘was never seriously investigated. Amid shrouds of secrecy and national security considerations, that avenue was never seriously pursued – although it was officially declared as being of major importance for the defence case. This is totally incomprehensible to any rational observer.’ The prosecution, Köchler noted, dismissed evidence on the grounds that it was not relevant; but now that that evidence has finally – partially – been released, it turns out to be very relevant indeed: to the defence.

Whatever happens, al-Megrahi may not have to wait long. As soon as a further appeal is scheduled, he can make an application to be released from custody: the convicted Lockerbie bomber, who was supposed to serve no fewer than 27 years in a Scottish jail, might well be free this summer. Whether al-Megrahi is freed pending his appeal – and what conditions would be applied if he were – depends largely on whether his defence team can convince the judge that he is not a flight risk. This may be hard to do. The judge might decide that if he left the country, he might choose to stay in Libya rather than come back next year for another round in court. If al-Megrahi is exonerated, many tricky questions will resurface, not least what to do about the $2.7 billion compensation paid by Libya to the relatives of the victims of the bombing. And then, of course, there is the question of who really bombed Flight 103.

In the first three years following the bombing, before a shred of evidence had been produced to incriminate Libya, the Dumfries and Galloway police, the FBI and several other intelligence services around the world all shared the belief that the Lockerbie bombers belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC), a Palestinian rejectionist organisation backed by Iran. The PFLP-GC is headed by Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian army captain; its headquarters are in Damascus and it is closely allied with the Syrian president and other senior Syrian officials. In the 1970s and 1980s the PFLP-GC carried out a number of raids against Israel, including a novel hang-glider assault launched from inside Lebanon. Lawyers, intelligence services and diplomats around the world continue to suspect that Jibril – who has even boasted that he is responsible – was behind Lockerbie.

The case against Jibril and his gang is well established. It runs like this: in July 1988, five months before the Lockerbie bombing, a US naval commander aboard USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian airbus, apparently mistaking it for an attacker. On board Iran Air Flight 655 were 270 pilgrims en route to Mecca. Ayatollah Khomeini vowed the skies would ‘rain blood’ in revenge and offered a $10 million reward to anyone who ‘obtained justice’ for Iran. The suggestion is that the PFLP-GC was commissioned to undertake a retaliatory bombing.

We know at least that two months before Lockerbie, a PFLP-GC cell was active in the Frankfurt and Neuss areas of West Germany. On 26 October 1998, German police arrested 17 terrorist suspects who, surveillance showed, had cased Frankfurt airport and browsed Pan Am flight timetables. Four Semtex-based explosive devices were confiscated; a fifth is known to have gone missing. They were concealed inside Toshiba radios very similar to the one found at Lockerbie a few weeks later. One of the gang, a Palestinian known as Abu Talb, was later found to have a calendar in his flat in Sweden with the date of 21 December circled. New evidence, now in the hands of al-Megrahi’s defence, proves for the first time that Abu Talb was in Malta when the Lockerbie bombing took place. The Maltese man whose testimony convicted al-Megrahi has also identified Abu Talb. During al-Megrahi’s trial Abu Talb had a strange role. As part of a defence available in Scottish law, known as ‘incrimination’, Abu Talb was named as someone who – rather than the accused – might have carried out the bombing. At the time he was serving a life sentence in Sweden for the bombing of a synagogue, but he was summoned to Camp Zeist to give evidence. He ended up testifying as a prosecution witness, denying that he had anything to do with Lockerbie. In exchange for his testimony, he received lifelong immunity from prosecution.

Other evidence has emerged showing that the bomb could have been placed on the plane at Frankfurt airport, a possibility that the prosecution in al-Megrahi’s trial consistently ruled out (their case depended on the suitcase containing the bomb having been transferred from a connecting flight from Malta). Most significantly, German federal police have provided financial records showing that on 23 December 1988, two days after the bombing, the Iranian government deposited £5.9 million into a Swiss bank account that belonged to the arrested members of the PFLP-GC.

The decision to steer the investigation away from the PFLP-GC and in the direction of Libya came in the run-up to the first Gulf War, as America was looking to rally a coalition to liberate Kuwait and was calling for support from Iran and Syria. Syria subsequently joined the UN forces. Quietly, the evidence incriminating Jibril, so painstakingly sifted from the debris, was binned.

Those who continued to press the case against the PFLP-GC seemed to fall foul of American law. When a New York corporate investigative company asked to look into the bombing on behalf of Pan Am found the PFLP-GC responsible, the federal government promptly indicted the company’s president, Juval Aviv, for mail fraud. Lester Coleman, a former Defense Intelligence Agency operative who was researching a book about the PFLP-GC and Lockerbie, was charged by the FBI with ‘falsely procuring a passport’. William Casey, a lobbyist who made similar allegations in 1995, found his bank accounts frozen and federal agents searching through his trash. Even so, documents leaked from the US Defense Intelligence Agency in 1995, two years after the Libyans were first identified as the prime suspects, still blamed the PFLP-GC.

Suspicions and conspiracy theories have swirled around Lockerbie from the beginning. Some of them are fairly outlandish. In Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse (2005), Brigid Keenan, the wife of the British diplomat Alan Waddams, reported that over dinner in Gambia, a former Interpol agent told her and her husband that the bombing had been a revenge attack by Iran, in retaliation for the downed airliner (though she didn’t say how he knew this). The Interpol agent claimed the cargo had not been checked because the plane was carrying drugs as part of a deal over American hostages held by Hizbullah in Beirut. Militant groups were being allowed to smuggle heroin into the US in exchange for information; the bomb had gone on board when the PFLP-GC found a loophole in this drug-running operation.

At least four US intelligence officers, including the CIA’s deputy station chief in Beirut, were on the Flight 103 passenger list. In the days following the bombing, CIA agents scoured the Scottish countryside, some reportedly dressed in Pan Am overalls. Mary Boylan, then a constable with Lothian and Borders police, has said that senior police officers told her not to make an official record of the CIA badge she recovered from the wreckage, asking her instead to hand it over to a senior colleague. Her testimony, too, is now in the hands of the SCCRC. Jim Wilson, a farmer from the village of Tundergarth, reported shortly after the bombing that he had found in his field a suitcase packed with a powdery substance that looked ‘like drugs’. He last saw the suitcase when he handed it over to the police, he said; he was never asked about it again.

In December 1998, Susan Lindauer, a US congressional aide, submitted a sworn deposition to the court in which she claimed that Richard Fuisz, a CIA agent, had given her a guarantee that he knew who was behind the Lockerbie bombing. Lindauer’s affidavit describes a conversation in Fuisz’s ‘business office’ in Chantilly, Virginia, in which he said he knew for sure the perpetrators were based in Syria. ‘Dr Fuisz has told me that he can identify who orchestrated and executed the bombing. Dr Fuisz has said that he can confirm absolutely that no Libyan national was involved in planning or executing the bombing of Pan Am 103, either in any technical or advisory capacity whatsoever.’ ‘If the government would let me, I could identify the men behind this attack,’ Lindauer says Fuisz told her. Lindauer has since been accused by the US government of being an Iraqi agent; her case is pending. But her earlier deposition has been submitted to the SCCRC. It can’t count for much, however, since Fuisz himself is not able to comment. In October 1994, a month after Lindauer spoke to him, Fuisz was gagged by a Washington court. The US government ruled that under state secrecy laws he faced ten years in prison if he spoke about the Lockerbie bombing. UN observers have since criticised this apparent restraint of a key witness.

When Libya handed al-Megrahi over for trial, sanctions on Libya authorised by the Security Council were suspended and diplomatic relations with Britain restored. Tony Blair claims the Libyan detente was one of his most important foreign policy victories, and last month, as the long shadow began to fall across his premiership, Blair swung by Tripoli to meet again with Libya’s leader. Gaddafi has always contested that al-Megrahi is not the Lockerbie bomber and that he should be allowed to return home. Maybe the two leaders touched on the prickly topic of what should be done about the compensation paid by Libya, in the event al-Megrahi is exonerated. When al-Megrahi was handed over for trial, Libya declared that it would accept responsibility for his actions. But it never accepted guilt. This distinction was spelled out clearly in Libyan letters to the UN Security Council. In a BBC radio interview in 2004, the Libyan prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, underlined once again that compensation had been paid because this was the ‘price for peace’ and to secure the lifting of sanctions. When asked if Libya did not accept guilt, he said: ‘I agree with that.’

If the court that convicted al-Megrahi now reverses its decision, then Libya would clearly have a case for demanding its money back. Since recovering the compensation from the relatives would be unthinkable, it is more likely Libya would pursue those responsible for the miscarriage of justice. ‘What they might try to do,’ Black suggests, ‘is to recoup the money from the British and American governments, who after all are responsible for the initial farce and the wrongful conviction in the first place. They paid that money on the basis of a miscarriage of justice perpetrated by the British courts.’ Al-Megrahi’s acquittal on appeal would not ipso facto make a compelling case for Libya to have its money back: even if guilt can’t be proved beyond reasonable doubt – the test of the criminal burden of proof – it could still be shown that it was more likely than not (which is the burden applied to civil cases such as compensation cases). If Libya paid the money for purely political reasons then, one could argue, it might have to live with that decision. When I asked the Foreign Office whether Britain would consider reimbursing Libya in the event of al-Megrahi’s exoneration, a spokesman declined to comment.

If al-Megrahi is acquitted, he will also have the right to sue for wrongful conviction. He could claim compensation to the tune of several tens of thousands of pounds. The Crown Office, which is headed by the Scottish lord advocate, is responsible for what happened, which means that al-Megrahi would sue the Scottish Executive. The lord advocate is now one of the ‘Scottish ministers’, whereas previously he – now she – was one of the law officers of the UK Government. The Scottish Executive might refuse to pay, blaming Westminster. Westminster, meanwhile, would argue that Lockerbie is and always has been a Crown Office matter and that the UK government has no say. A political storm is on its way, especially now that the SNP is in charge in Scotland.

Since the case against al-Megrahi was so weak, it is hard to understand how the judges who presided over the trial could have got it so wrong. Black has a view:

It has been suggested to me, very often by Libyans, that political pressure was placed upon the judges. I don’t think for a minute that political pressure of that nature was placed on the judges. What happened, I think, was that it was internal politics in Scotland. Prosecutions in Scotland are brought by the lord advocate. Until just a few years ago, one of the other functions of the lord advocate in Scotland was that he appointed all Scottish judges. I think what influenced these judges was that they thought that if both of the Libyans accused are found not guilty, this will be the most fiendish embarrassment to the lord advocate.

The appointment system for judges has changed since the trial, but another controversial aspect of the al-Megrahi case may also be re-examined: the policies on disclosure. Compared to almost any other similar criminal justice system, Scotland does not have a proper system of disclosure of information. In England and Wales, the Crown has to disclose all material to the defence, according to rules set out in statute. In Scotland the Crown is allowed to modify or withhold evidence if it considers that withholding is in the ‘public interest’. At least the Scottish criminal justice system doesn’t have the death penalty.

It spelled the end of Pan Am, which never recovered from the damage to its reputation.

I have pointed this out before! along with Townsend Thoresen and possibly TWA and hostage crisis (plane stormed on runway?) and yet United and American still survive? Maybe that in itself is proof that United and American stock where never used? and there were no compensation pay outs?_________________'Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
Help, help, I'm being repressed!'

“The more you tighten your grip, the more Star Systems will slip through your fingers.”

Headline: Megrahi told he'd be home in six months
Source: Sunday Times
Issue Date: Sunday June 10, 2007
Byline: Marcello Mega and Mark Macaskill
Page: Scotland News 6
Word Count: 495
Edition: 1SN
Story Text:
THE Lockerbie bomber was told months ago by Libyan officials that a government deal was being struck to secure his release and he would be back in his home country by the end of the year.

Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was visited in Greenock prison by Libyan consular staff and informed that diplomatic efforts were under way to secure his extradition.

The claims, made by legal sources close to al-Megrahi, contradict the government's statement that a memorandum of co-operation announced last week between Tony Blair and Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, explicitly excluded al-Megrahi.

Controversy shows no sign of abating after it was revealed that the Scottish executive was not consulted about plans to move the former Libyan agent, who is serving a 27-year jail sentence for the 1988 atrocity, which killed 270 people.

Last Thursday, Alex Salmond, the first minister, made an emergency statement to the Scottish parliament, accusing Blair of treating the Scottish parliament with contempt.

Whitehall continues to insist al-Megrahi's release was never discussed with the Tripoli government and points out that the executive has the power to block any attempt to move the prisoner.

However, sources close to al-Megrahi believe the British government is keen to see him return to Libya as soon as possible. An imminent ruling by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) is expected to find his conviction "unsafe" and refer the case back to court.

"The UK and America want al-Megrahi off their hands and they don't want the integrity of their justice systems exposed to scrutiny in this case. A diplomatic solution is highly desirable," said the source.

"(al-Megrahi) was told that negotiations were well advanced and all the top people in the three governments wanted it to happen. He has been left in no doubt he will be returning to Libya and that it could even happen this year."

Al-Megrahi's main concern was to be in Libya to have regular access to his children, according to friends.

"He has missed out on years of their lives and he wants to see them grow up," said one source. "At the same time he is desperate to clear his name. Whether he is in Scotland or Libya, he wants the SCCRC to continue its deliberations and go back to court.

"If he is allowed to go home as a prisoner while the case is being prepared for a second appeal, al-Megrahi wouldn't have to attend the appeal court hearing, but if the appeal court orders a re-trial he would have to be present. Given what has happened to him in the name of Scottish justice so far, I don't think he could be advised to return."

The notion has appalled relatives of the victims on both sides of the Atlantic who fear they will never discover the truth if al-Megrahi's case is "swept under the carpet".

Yes he is. If you look back at my posts on this issue you'll see it's been hammered to death here.

Having met and asked Mr Shayler this - I don't think there is any deliberate agenda. From what I see the CIA, Vincent Cannistraro and possibly upper level mi6 types had this version distributed and adhered to. Thus what landed on the Libya desk was made to fit this context.

if there is to be any justice in this world then there has to be equality and sadly we live in a world where your nationality, passport and postcode does have a value.Libya is still in the process of paying compensation to the relatives of those who lost loved ones in the Lockerbie air disaster of 1988.

While it is difficult to put a value on anyone’s life, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s offer of $10 million dollars per passenger, $270 million dollars in total – was deemed acceptable by both George W Bush and Tony Blair.

I’m not really sure how the price was reached. Could it have been down to skin colour or class? No, nothing as overtly racist or imperialistic as that, I’m sure; it probably had more to do with zip codes, passports, nationalities and oil.

On Blair’s farewell vanity tour it is worth noting that during his cosy desert farewell with his new best friend Colonel Gaddafi they were also joined in the Sahara by BP Chairman Peter Sutherland. Hours later BP said it has signed a £450 million agreement, with the prospect of 17 oil wells being drilled. A spokesman added that if all this exploration reached its full potential the deal could be worth £13 billion which almost makes Gaddafi’s 'blood money' pale into insignificance.

Oil deals aside, it is the first time any compensation has been awarded to the bereaved families of those killed in a terrorist atrocity by a state designated a sponsor of terrorism. As I have said many times before, I can not differentiate between a Stealth Bomber or a suicide bomber; other than the fact the Stealth pilot usually wipes out more innocents and can always fly back to base, re-load and return to drop more bombs of death and destruction as many times as is deemed necessary.

Both these methods of killing wipe out innocents, and therefore both are to be condemned. Neither is carried out with military precision and I think we all recognise now there is no such thing as a surgical strike. So should Britain, America, Israel and other states who kill innocent civilians follow Libya’s lead and pay compensation to the families of loved ones blown apart by indiscriminate bombing?

I was one of the first journalists into Lockerbie that ghastly night in December 1988, just as I was one of the first journalists to get into the Palestinian town of Jenin in April 2002 where more than 50 men, women and children were slaughtered by the Israeli Army. (The United Nations was stopped by Israel from investigating war crimes). A year later I was in Afghanistan to watch a grieving mother bury ALL of her nine children from a babe in arms to her teenage daughter after a US laser guided missile was deliberately sent into her home.

And I can faithfully record that the twisted, blown up limbs of the passengers on Pan Am flight 103 were very similar to the blackened, bloated, broken corpses dragged from the rubble in Jenin and that family home in the village of Bermil near Shkin in Paktika. Not only did they all look the same but the smell of death which hung in the air was identical.

However, there was a difference; the majority of the 270 Pan Am passengers were Westerners with 189 of the victims being Americans making Lockerbie the deadliest attack on US civilians until 9/11. Like it or not, the life of a Westerner is worth so much more than someone from the Muslim world.

The Pan Am families also had the benefit of excellent lawyers from the top New York law firm, Kreindler & Kreindler. On a point of interest, families of those who perished in 9/11 have so far received an immediate payment of $50,000. The average award is expected to be $1.8 million with the final award being based on the victim's age, number of dependents and earning power.

And no, I don’t begrudge any of them a single dollar.

But if there is to be any justice in this world then there has to be equality and sadly we live in a world where your nationality, passport and postcode does have a value.

I have often said Muslim blood is cheap and there are rivers of it pouring through Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon and elsewhere at the moment. The only time I have been aware of America offering any compensation was in May 2003 when a total of 11 Afghan children were wiped out in an air strike on their home by mistake.

One of the grieving mothers I interviewed at the time had lost all of her nine children. She was given less than 10,000 dollars in blood and hush money and an apology from a US commander who turned up later in a 15-vehicle, heavily armed convoy. And I have to say that was only forthcoming when the US military heard a Western journalist (me) was investigating their war crime.

If Sawara Khan had lived in Lockerbie she would have been awarded 90 million dollars by Colonel Gaddafi, but life in Afghanistan is so much cheaper.

She told me at the time: “Some say I am a lucky to be alive but I am not a survivor. I can't count myself blessed. I am also a dead person now. I am dead inside. All my children have gone. My two-year-old boy Hazrat was crushed to death as he lay in my arms.

“It is like hell has visited our home. On Tuesday I had a family and by Wednesday I had nothing.” I clearly remember the words of the dead children’s father Mawes who said: “Nothing will ever be able to compensate me for the loss of my family. How can you put a price on a human body?”

May be that is a question that Tony Blair might want to address before he leaves office; after all there are at least 650,000 dead on his illegal war in Iraq, and the tens of thousands of innocents who have perished in Afghanistan.

I realise that not everybody on here will agree but having followed the investigation by the late Paul Foot and Tam Dalyell, I am certain that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is innocent.

A successful appeal will throw a lot of pyrotechnics on the fire - not least the controversy of who was really responsible. But the blackmailing of Muammar Qaddafi into accepting responsibility via sanctions and Blair's recent cosy relationship with him in order to flog him weapons.

Now, perhaps the media might start taking an interest in all the little loose ends which al-Megrahi's conviction conveniently overlooked.

BBC News item:

Lockerbie bomber allowed appeal

A report into the Lockerbie bomber's conviction has recommended that the Libyan is granted a second appeal.

What follows below is a day by day analysis of that trial at Camp Zeist, proving in graphic written form that the west had absolutely no credible evidence against any Libyan. In the end, one Libyan was sentenced on 'evidence' so utterly corrupt that it would be rejected out of hand in any normal court, by any normal magistrate. Unfortunately, Camp Zeist was not a normal court

Week 1: The start of the Lockerbie Trial was heralded not by intelligent comments from learned counsel as you might normally expect, but by a blast of carefully-orchestrated emotion from the western media. Any concept of "media balance" fell by the wayside as network vied with network to gain the most brownie points from the lobbies. Winner for the week was probably an Australian reporter who not only managed to interview four weeping relatives of the dead, but then went on to state the two Libyans were "...on trial for placing explosives on an Air Malta flight". No "allegedly" about it.

This was a defining moment in the Lockerbie Trial, which is not about guilt or innocence at the public level, but about the media's ability to work miracles with the human mind on behalf of the lobbies. Over the year to come we can confidently expect every dirty trick the media can muster, designed to finally convince readers that the Libyans must have done the job, regardless of the findings of the Scottish judges. If the Scottish judges find "Not Guilty" or "Not Proven", we will then be bombarded with shrieks of outrage from the western media, and shrill demands for a retrial.

There is simply too much at stake to allow the Libyans to fly home with a pat on the back, and a "thank you" for agreeing to turn up at Camp Zeist in the first place. Those readers who have managed to research the real scientific evidence on Lockerbie, will already be aware that most of it points towards America and Israel, rather than towards Libya and Syria. This of course raises the prospect of Zionist terrorists being directly responsible for the bombing of Pan Am 103, a shocking though realistic scenario the media will sweep under the carpet in seconds.

One of the most disturbing events this week was the defence (allegedly) stating the two Libyans knew ten people connected with the bombing, and would name them. Hopefully this was yet another media distortion which omitted the critical word "thought they knew ten people..." Certainly back in 1996 the Libyan suspects knew nothing of these people at all, and it would be reassuring if their legal defence team would make this important point very clear to media observers.

Finally this week, the biggest threat to the entire concocted Lockerbie story came not from within the Court itself, but from Swiss company MEBO AG. On Tuesday MEBO quietly posted a report stating it had sent a 16-page report to the Scottish Crown Office/Lord Advocate, proving that the explosion which destroyed Pan Am 103 was not in a Samsonite suitcase as claimed, but "directly on the [fuselage] skin" of the Boeing 747. The author first researched this harsh scientific reality and reported it to a senior British Member of Parliament, before publishing detailed findings in the Australian Strategy newspaper during September 1999. A condensed version of my original report can be read on this website under "Setting Up The Libyans, Page Two".

Week 2 This week it was the turn of police officers present at the Pan Am 103 crash site to give evidence to the Scottish Court at Camp Zeist. Things are certainly not going the way the prosecution would have liked, which is probably why the western mainstream media has discreetly avoided reporting trial progress this week.

Scottish Detective Gilchrist conceded that not every piece of evidence [recovered from the crash site] could be properly labeled, the task was simply too huge. Defence lawyer Richard Keen questioned Gilchrist about a police label attached to a piece of cloth, and circuit board. Detective Gilchrist confirmed the writing on the label was his own, then became visibly upset when shown an enlarged photo of the label, which revealed the description [on the label] had been altered from "cloth" to "debris", in violation of the law and police procedures.

The team of defence lawyers is demonstrating, in no uncertain terms, how determined it is to prove the innocence of the two indicted Libyans. The forethought and attention to detail shown in the case of this single evidence label, proves that little (if any) forged American "evidence" will be allowed at the Lockerbie trial.

By Thursday the defence had effectively dispatched so many witnesses, the prosecution felt obliged to ask for an adjournment while it arranged the next phase of its attack, comprising mainly technical evidence. The prosecution's request for an adjournment was grudgingly granted by the presiding judge, and the trial will recommence on the morning of 23 May 2000.

Week 4: There was no week three. After being adjourned for twelve days, the Lockerbie trial recommenced at Camp Zeist on Tuesday 23 May, but only for a little while. Problems with special equipment used to relay instant transcription to screens, forced an adjournment till Wednesday.

Once again police officers were interviewed about procedures used to search the crash site, and once again confirmed they had no specialist knowledge for this task, although forensic scientists had briefed them on what to look for, in particular "any sign of printed circuit boards."

On Thursday 25 May, Senior Air Accident Board (AAIB) Inspector Christopher Protheroe, delivered a bombshell to the Court. Mr Protheroe was obliged to admit that on the previous Monday he had advised prosecution lawyers that a complex formula used to calculate blast wave effects after an initial explosion [Mach Stem Effect], had been incorrectly applied in the official 1990 AAIB report on the crash of Pan Am 103. This was a potentially catastrophic admission for the team of prosecutors, who claim the bomb was concealed in a suitcase in a baggage container, at least 25 inches inboard of the fuselage skin.

Put briefly, "Mach Stem Effect" is created when the incident shock wave from a blast collides with the reflected shock wave, in combination creating an increase in overpressure greater than the incident shock wave by itself. Protheroe admitted the correct calculation showed a maximum distance from the fuselage skin for this shock wave collision not at 25 inches, but 12 inches, i.e. the bomb could not have been in the baggage container, but was close against the fuselage skin itself.

This latter reality was reported by the author during mid-1999, with a condensed version of the text shown here on this website in "Setting Up Libya for the Lockerbie Bombing". This crucial AAIB admission has the potential to destroy the case against the Libyan accused.
There was then another adjournment until Tuesday 30 May, brought about by the need to display the complete reconstructed baggage container in the Court. The container is too large to pass through the door into the Court, so will probably have to be taken apart and reassembled inside - hence the delay.

The trial was completely overshadowed this week by breaking news that the Deputy Director of the Lockerbie Trial Briefing Unit, was formerly a high-ranking member of the British external intelligence service SIS, commonly referred to as "MI6". Professor Andrew Fulton, former MI6 Head of Station in Washington, DC, was exposed in a Sunday Herald report on 21 May, and did not deny the claim. Since then Professor Fulton has been dismissed from the Lockerbie Trial Unit, which has now lost all credibility as an "impartial" body providing information to the media about Lockerbie and Pan Am 103.

Deliberate interference by MI6 should come as no great surprise to anyone, with its known close links to the CIA. Furthermore, like the CIA, MI6 was long ago deeply penetrated by agents of the State of Israel, prime suspects in the Lockerbie bombing. This was commented on earlier by the author in the investigation into WPC Yvonne Fletcher's murder outside the Libyan Embassy during 1984.

Week 5: The trial opened this week with the damaged baggage container from Pan Am 103 displayed in the courtroom. The reconstructed container is important in determining the guilt or otherwise of the two accused Libyans. If 100% proof exists that the bomb was inside the container, there may be a case to continue the trial. However, if reasonable doubt exists over the actual location of the bomb, then the two Libyans effectively have no case to answer.

Air Accident Investigations Branch inspector Peter Clayton, described how he found a small fragment of circuit board "wedged into a warped metal tag used to identify the manufacturers of the aluminium container". In further evidence, Clayton said a fairly cursory examination of a data plate [the manufacturer's identification plate] from the aluminium container revealed "debris lodged in a fold."

Clayton's evidence, like Protheroe's in week four, is crucial. The manufacturers' data plate is positioned on the outside of these baggage containers, meaning that if it had been literally "wedged into the warped metal tag", the explosion must have occurred outside the baggage container, in order to drive the fragment of circuit board into the data plate. If the explosion has occurred inside the container, the fragment of circuit board would have been driven into the inside aluminium wall of the container, behind the manufacturer's data plate. Clayton's evidence does not appear to support the prosecution claim that the bomb was inside the container, but contradicts it.

For absolute clarity here, we need to know whether the fragment was "wedged into" the side of the plate with writing on it, i.e. the outside, or on the reverse, i.e the inside. Professor Peel of the government Defence Research and Investigation Agency (DERA), told the court how he had applied algebraic equations to data describing damage to the aircraft fuselage, to determine the location and weight of the bomb. Prof Peel claimed that only a unique combination of charge size and distance could have caused the damage he observed. While Peel is right to claim that only a "unique combination of charge size and distance" could have caused the damage, there is no hard evidence that his personal interpretation is the correct one.

In this regard, defence lawyer Richard Keen, QC, told Professor Peel "you have not simply developed an analytical model, but gone back and altered your view of the facts to apply that analytical model." Prof Peel denied Keen's suggestion.

Week 6: Judges at the trial in Camp Zeist have decided to ignore claims from Iranian defector Ahmad Behbahani that he ordered the bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988, using Syrians and Libyans to do the job. A worthy decision by the judges. At the time of the Lockerbie crash, Behbahni had just celebrated his 20th birthday. A trifle too young to be the mastermind of Iranian Intelligence..

This week, British agencies tasked with the scientific evaluation of the Lockerbie crash site and debris, confirmed their appalling track record of failing to properly test vital components of "the bomb", or what they claim was the bomb. Scientist John Douse of DERA admitted that scraps from "the bomb's electronic timer or the tape player and suitcase it was allegedly found in", were not tested for explosives residue.

How very convenient! Scraps of metal from the baggage container alleged to have housed the bomb apparently showed minute traces of explosive compounds "sometimes used in the manufacture of Semtex." The explosive substances named were RDX and PETN. Most readers will appreciate that fragments from the container walls would show traces of explosives, whether the bomb was positioned inside or outside the container.

With its credibility in tatters, the prosecution resorted to the old "Screened Witness" trick, allowing two CIA operatives to appear behind a curtain, their voices screened electronically. Kenneth Steiner and Warren Clemens explained how they had examined a briefcase seized in Dakar during February 1986 which included electronic timers. Then it was the turn of the BATF. Agents Richard Sherwood and Edward Owen described examining a captured arms cache in Togo, which also included electronic timers.

Photographs of the Dakar and Togo timers shown to the court showed the lettering "MST-13", the batch number allocated by Swiss firm MEBO AG to its own series of electronic timing devices! So what? Unless and until those arrested and charged for "carrying" the timers appear at Camp Zeist (which I assure you will not happen), this entire episode can be put down as intelligence agency manipulation of the Scottish Court.

Next week the court will probably be packed, and the prosecution extremely nervous. On Tuesday the Chairman of Swiss company MEBO AG, Edwin Bollier, is due to appear to give evidence. He will be carrying a load of extremely credible evidence proving that the bomb on Pan Am 103 was positioned next to the fuselage skin, and not in the baggage container as claimed by the prosecution.

Most of Bollier's claims have the written backing of Professor Hitmar Schubert, of the Fraunhofer Institute in Munich, Germany. Prof Schubert is a world expert in this area, and the Fraunhofer Institute's principal client is the German Federal Defence Ministry. Mr Bollier has written a report detailing his latest claims on Pam Am 103, and posted it on the internet. Those interested can read his report here.

Also this week, Maltese journalist Joe Mifsud posted an authenticated copy of a warning telex circulated by Interpol on 15 November 1988, just weeks before the bombing of Pan Am 103. The author has written a report based on this telex, explaining that the bomb mentioned by Interpol was a "decoy".

Week 7: DERA scientist Alan Feraday presented the Court with a "reconstructed" bomb based on black Toshiba RT SF 16 Bombeat radio cassette. This despite the fact that under cross-examination by defence counsel Keene, Feraday concurred that his original notes specified a white Toshiba 8016 or 8026 type cassette recorder. Mr Keene paid particular attention to Feraday's earlier "expert" tesimony in the case of R v Berry, where the guilty verdict was subsequently reversed on appeal, and the term "dogmatic" used in reference to Feraday's evidence.

Feraday's "reconstructed bomb" highlights the flawed way in which the prosecution intents to convict the Libyan accused. Not by use of hard scientific evidence, but by a series of mind-games and charades. Most readers would assume "reconstructed bomb" means the actual components of a real bomb put back together again, after proper testing for explosive residue etc. So far as the Oxford Dictionary is concerned, the reader would be correct in his or her assumption, but that is far from the case where Mr Feraday's "bomb" is concerned.

In reality, Mr Feraday manufactured a "simulated bomb" based on guesswork, containing not a shred of the original material allegedly recovered from the crash site at Lockerbie. He claims to have managed this after "examining" several plastic pieces recovered from the site, and scraps of paper said to have been part of a Toshiba instruction manual, also recovered from the crash site.

So were the fragments Feraday "examined" properly tested for explosives residue in order to establish a scientific connection to his claims? Well, no they were not! This is pure Alice in Wonderland stuff, so far removed from scientific reality that the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency in Kent, UK, should be closed forthwith.

Late in the week Erwin Meister, the co- founding member of MEBO AG , confirmed knowing Said Rashid and Ezzadin Hinshri [cited in the indictment] and further confirmed MEBO supplied them with approximately 20 MST-13 timing devices. Meister also identified the first accused, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi. Mr Meiser clarified a number of points on the sale and distribution of MST-13 timers, including a number to the East German Stasi.

The prosecution asked Meister if his co-founder Mr Edwin Bollier had visited Libya during 1993. Mr Meister claimed this as true, and that the trip was regarding a loan of 1.8 million Swiss francs. However, the alleged loan was never made. MEBO co-founder Mr Edwin Bollier will take the stand next week.

Week 8: MEBO co-founder Mr Meister continued testimony, and after identifying Mr Al Megrahi as a former business contact, repeated several times that his memory was poor and getting worse. Mr Meister agreed his identification of Al Megrahi might have resulted from press photos rather than his own recollections. Under cross examination, Meister admitted he had not earlier mentioned a business trip to Syria in 1984, during which he unsuccessfully attempted to sell telephone equipment. Apparently the defence is focusing on this obscure point because it wishes to prove the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PLFP-GC), then based in Syria, and another Palestinian group, was responsible for the bombing of Pan Am 103.

This is an extremely reckless defence approach. Just as it is impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt the Libyan accused are guilty, it is equally impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that members of the PLFP-GC are guilty. Readers might like to speculate on who instructed defence solicitors to take this hazardous course of action, which in the end will at least "point the finger" at one Arab state or another, using the same fatally flawed evidence provided by current US prison inmate Lester Coleman, alias Thomas Leavy.

Edwin Bollier, the second founding member of MEBO, provided general background company details, and later stated his company fitted briefcases with the technology to radio-detonate remote controlled bombs. Based on Swiss Telekom and Motorola pagers, these devices were sold to the East German Stasi. This simple confirmation made the national news in Australia, where there has been a total black-out since the start of the Lockerbie trial. But oh how the facts were changed before they hit the television screens here! According to a national Australian network, MEBO admitted selling briefcase radio detonators to the Libyans, one of which was then used to destroy Pan Am 103!

Blatantly manipulated reportage of this kind has been commonplace in the Lockerbie Case since 1988, showing very clearly who is really trying to convict the Libyans, or Syrians, or perhaps the Iranians. At no time has the Australian media mentioned the realistic probability that the Israelis and Americans ordered and conducted the operation. Like used car salesmen with only three models in stock, the media has already demonstrated its willful intent to ensure that one of these three "Dirty Ayrab" states will act as "fall guy" for the 270 dead at Lockerbie.

On Tuesday Mr Bollier confirmed MEBO sold electronic timers to the Libyans. In 1985 he visited Tripoli to deliver 20 such custom-made devices. Mr Bollier told the court he later saw the timers being tested at the special forces training area at Sabha, Libya, and told the court: "I was present when two such timers were included in bomb cylinders." The 62-year-old added: "They were military aircraft bombs." This caused a bit of a stir among members of the media down here in Australia, because "Aircraft Bombs" sounded just like the bomb on Pan Am 103. Wrong! The devices in question were free-fall bombs of the kind carried and dropped from the bomb bays or wing pylons of military aircraft.

On a more serious note, Mr Bollier claimed that the fragments of MST-13 timer shown to him in the Camp Zeist Court, had been altered since he was first allowed to examine them in Scotland during September 1999. During that visit Mr Bollier was considerably concerned that his lawyer was barred by authorities from viewing the evidence at the same time, thus preventing corroboration at the time of examination. "They [the fragments] have been modified, I swear they have been modified,'' Mr Bollier told the Court at Camp Zeist, adding his firm did not necessarily supply the timer, and the fragments could have come from counterfeit copies.

Bollier did identify the two fragments as appearing to come from a MST-13 circuit board. But he said the pieces seemed to have been burnt since he first saw them at a Scottish police office in 1999, and one was slightly smaller than a photo taken shortly after it was found. Mr Bollier insisted that several versions of the fragments might be floating about, without giving further details. The fragments he viewed could have come from timers he sold to Libya or to East Germany or might even be counterfeit copies since the blueprints Mebo used to make the circuit boards had mysteriously disappeared, he said. ``It could be counterfeit,'' Bollier said when asked where a fragment could have come from.

Mr Bollier confirmed several sales by MEBO to Libya in 1985 including mobile radio equipment, timers, radio controls, Motorola receivers and "transmitters in suitcases". Bollier said it was made clear the timers had to be stable and heavy and able to operate over a long period of time. He said Mebo solved the problem by creating timers which could deal with a period of 9,999 minutes or 9,999 hours. Mr Bollier said his MEBO technician developed the timer on the basis of the specifications received from Tripoli. His technician produced two sample timers and these were delivered to Libya in the summer of 1985.

Bollier claimed that only about 20 timers total were sent to Libya. The first five were provided as samples, five were sent via the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin and the last 10 were taken to Libya personally by Mr Bollier. He said that the timers were for the purpose of detonating explosive devices, and had been told Libya needed these devices because of the Chad war. They wanted to leave explosive charges in military camps when they left these camps.

Later in the week Mr Bollier was savaged by prosecution and defence alike, who concentrated on a letter sent by him to the CIA in 1989. At one stage in the proceedings Mr Bollier was accused of working for the East German Stasi, with suggestions he sent the letter in order to deflect attention away from the PFLG-GC, who the prosecution are trying to prove were really responsible for the bombing on Pan Am 103. Things are rarely as they seem at Camp Zeist, however, and a proper analysis of the chain of events will be posted on this web site shortly. Those interested should check the "Updates" page during the next few days.

Week 9: Former Stasi employee Joachim Wenzel claimed to have been Mr Edwin Bollier's "handler" between 1982 and 1985, though it is impossible to say with certainty whether Wenzel's claims are true or false. In traditional intelligence agency fashion, Wenzel was hidden behind a screen, his voice altered digitally to protect him. Protect him from what exactly? Unless and until Bollier is prepared to sign a confession stating that this man was indeed his handler, or unedited video tapes of physical meetings between the two men are played to the Court, "Wenzel" is just another example of unsubstantiated hearsay evidence not admissible in a Scottish Court of Law.

Swiss firm MEBO has never tried to deny selling equipment (including MST-13 timers) to the East Germans during this period, but as suppliers there is no way Meister or Bollier could possibly know the end point of their products. For example, though British MI6 purchases electronic equipment from Marconi (UK), no-one but a fool would try to suggest Marconi has the slightest idea where or when this equipment is used. "Wenzel "said Bollier supplied "receivers, recognition devices,. everything to do with radio technology," for the Stasi, including timers with digital and rotary switch displays, plus radio equipment to listen to NATO military broadcasts.

Radio equipment to listen to NATO military broadcasts? Shock horror! Surely this must mean that Mr Bollier was pro-communist, anti-NATO, and therefore not to be trusted. Yet another example of the sleazy way this case is being conducted at the pseudo subliminal level. Just about anyone could make a radio capable of receiving NATO military broadcasts, including the author.

Attempting to put the boot in further, David Burns QC, for Mr Al Megrahi, asked: "Did you suspect because of his various journeys to London and Paris that Bollier had connections with other terrorist organizations?" Mr Wenzel said: "We made certain assumptions because we were not sure that possibly there were such connections but we were never able to prove these." Mr Burns asked: "And these I think included ETA and the IRA?" The witness replied: "Yes." Oh dear! "Wenzel" had provided more unsubstantiated hearsay slander that Mr Bollier could not rebut, because he had already been dismissed by the Court. It will take a great deal more than this rubbish to draw a link between the Palestinians and Pan Am 103.

The defence is currently showing all the signs of a team that has completely lost the plot, and is endangering its clients in the process. The defence is reminded again here that all it needs to do is show "reasonable doubt" its clients placed a bomb on Pan Am 103. There is currently so much doubt swilling around the Camp Zeist Courtroom, it is truly amazing the judges have not already shut the show trial down, and ordered the return of the two Libyans to Tripoli.

Ueli Lumpert, a former employee of MEBO, confirmed he had manufactured MST-13 timers. He said the fragment shown to him in court "could be" from an MST-13 timer. Initially when shown a letter dated 4 October 1993, Lumpert said he did not remember it, but confirmed his signature. The letter states there was a technical problem with the prototype MST-13 timers which necessitated that he worked on a Saturday to correct the problem in 1985. It went on to say that at the beginning of 1993 Mr Bollier began to check if there were any MST-13 circuit boards still in the company and it was then that GDR documents were found. When asked if he first remembered about the timers being supplied to the GDR just before the letter in 1993, he said yes. During his evidence Lumpert maintained that at the time of production he did not know who he was making the timers for, but later realized they must have been for the GDR as Bollier took them to Berlin.

At this point the pseudo subliminal nature of the Camp Zeist Court "evidence" kicks in again. Lumpert was an employee of the Swiss firm MEBO, an electronics engineer responsible for designing equipment to specifications dictated by his employers Meister and Bollier. There is absolutely no reason why Lumpert should be privy to information on end points or end users, and it is entirely unreasonable for the prosecution or defence to press him on this point. When these prosecution and defence lawyers were promoted to QC, did any of them challenge higher authority and ask "why?" Of course not, it was a management decision.

On 29 June the suspects' passports were examined. Arabic translator Djelloul Hamaz told the court on Thursday that the passports contained various stamps from Tripoli international Airport in December 1988. Prosecutor Alastair Campbell QC pointed out a green-colored stamp in Mr Fhimah's passport which he said suggested the defendant had traveled through Tripoli airport on 18 December, 1988 - three days before the explosion. Other stamps showed movements on 20 and 29 December. The court was also shown a passport in the name of Ahmed Khalifa Abdusamad, which the indictment alleges was a false name used by Al Megrahi.

Pseudo subliminal again. Of what relevance are the movements of the two Libyans to the bombing of Pan Am 103? None, of course. Even if both accused flew from Tripoli to Malta on the day of the bombing, in isolation this information is worthless. What the prosecution is trying to replicate is a procedure much-loved in Australian courts: Stitch the defendants up with a chain of unconnected and uncorroborated events, sufficient to swamp the judges and make them see it "their way". It is perhaps fortunate the Libyans are on trial in a Scottish Court of Law, where tricks like these are simply not permitted. The trial is now adjourned until 12 July to allow the Crown time to consider the precognitions of the additional witnesses contained within a list lodged by the Defence.

Week 11: At the start of this week, MEBO AG lawyer Dieter Neubert (Neubert & Partners, Zurich), filed an official criminal complaint against the Crown in the Lockerbie case for falsification of evidence. In his letter to the Office of the Procurator Fiscal, Mr Neubert accuses the Crown of using a forged fragment of an alleged [MEBO] MST-13 timer. Full details of the letter will be released in due course, but Mr Nuebert has apparently also accused the Crown of having manipulated and disfigured the alleged timer in order to obscure the true shape and colour of the fragment, in order to prevent accurate identification.

Readers may remember that during late 1999, Mr Edwin Bollier of MEBO was finally allowed to view the alleged MST-13 timer fragment in Scotland, and found the colour was not the same as that shown in photos presented to him during 1991. Mr Bollier was so concerned that he made a further statement detailing the irregularities, which were also noted at that time by the Procurator Fiscal, and by a Scottish Police Detective Inspector.

From the outset, the Crown really only had two straws to grasp at in terms of a "credible" prosecution. First there was the famous timer fragment, now doubly in doubt because of alleged Crown forensic tampering, and the dismissal of the FBI's top man for "tampering with evidence" in cases which may have included Lockerbie.

The second straw is the now-famous media beat-up about a Maltese shopkeeper positively identifying one of the two Libyan accused at Camp Zeist. According to the mainstream media, prodded on ruthlessly by the Israeli Lobbies, Tony Gauci of "Mary's House" in Malta, positively identified defendant Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi during 1989 as the man who bought baby clothes from his store. As is customary in all matters concerning the "National Security" of the State of Israel, this media story was a complete and utter lie.

Tony and Paul Gauci [joint owners of Mary's House in Sliema] left Malta for Camp Zeist at 2245 hrs on Sunday, accompanied by a Scottish officer and a Maltese policeman aboard Transavia Flight 786. According to journalist Joe Mifsud of the newspaper Kullhadd, Mr Gauci has made a total of 19 statements about the incident to various authorities over the years, not one of which provided a positive identification of al-Megrahi.

According to Reuters, in the court Gauci tried to recall events. It was shortly before Christmas, I can't remember the exact date, maybe a fortnight before Christmas"..."eleven years are a long time for me, but in those days I told them everything exactly.'' Gauci said the man had black hair, wore a blue suit and was less than 6 feet tall. He confirmed a series of mug shots and artists impressions that he had been shown by Scottish investigators during several meetings at Malta police headquarters in the fall of 1989. Later: Gauci continued his testimony.

He said the man looked around and when Mr Gauci invited him to try on some trousers he said they were for someone else. The man then bought two pairs of trousers, two shirts, two cardigans, two pairs of pajamas, a blue romper suit and, because it was raining slightly at the time, an umbrella. "He left the shop to go to the taxi rank to get a taxi. He came back in the taxi to collect the clothing, which I took out to the taxi."

"That is the one who resembles the man who came into my shop,'' Gauci said, pointing to al-Megrahi sitting next to his bespectacled co-accused Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima in the witness box., "the one without glasses." Unfortunately, Gauci used exactly the same phrase to describe a newspaper photograph of Mohammed Abu Talb, a Lebanese member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC).

The grainy, black and white photograph of Abu Talb, who is in jail for terrorism in Sweden and has been named as a prosecution witness, was first shown to Gauci by his brother and then later referred to by Gauci in police statements as bearing a close likeness to the man he served in his shop. Readers may ask why on earth Gauci was summoned to the Court at all. other than as a desperate measure by the Crown to keep the "Show Trial of the Century" going for a little longer.

On Tuesday 12 July the Court was adjourned yet again, because several prosecution witnesses from Malta refused to appear. The prosecution had in fact known about their unwillingness to attend for months, but was either incompetent, or unwilling to call forward substitutes in time to keep the trial rolling seamlessly. Exactly why the witnesses refused to appear has not been stated, but a strong pointer to their reasoning was provided by one Maltese prosecution witness who did: Mr Manuel Ferrugia, a rather flamboyant gentleman with four earrings in his left ear, told the Court how he had traveled from Malta to Frankfurt aboard Air Malta Flight KM180 on the day of the crash.

Was Mr Ferrugia booked to travel from Frankfurt to London on the Pan Am 103 feeder flight? No, he was not. Well then, was Mr Ferrugia's baggage lost en-route, or did he perhaps have critical information about the accused Libyans? No on both counts. The bottom line is that Mr Ferrugia was flown to Holland and accommodated at British taxpayer expense, simply to tell the court that he flew out of Malta aboard an Air Malta Boeing 737 on the day of the Pan Am Crash. Fascinating travel information of course, rather like the author's flight out of Calcutta for London during 1984 aboard a British Airways jet, but neither journey is of any possible relevance to the Trial of the Century at Camp Zeist.

Hopefully Mr Ferrugia enjoyed the Air Malta in-flight service on 21 December 1988, and hopefully British taxpayers will understand the prosecution's need to "construct" a connection between Malta and Pan Am 103 using irrelevant information. Thanks should therefore be extended to the majority of Maltese witnesses who refused to attend this pathetic game of charades, thereby saving British taxpayers a small fortune.

On Friday Mr Wilfred Borg, Ground Operations Manager for Luqa Airport in Malta, was asked a wide range of questions about baggage check-in procedures and baggage tags. Mr Borg appeared to stand up to the questions very well, giving the impression that shoving pieces of unaccompanied baggage onto an Air Malta flight unnoticed, would be extremely difficult. Indeed, the efficiency of Luqa Airport security during December 1988 was demonstrated quite clearly earlier in the week, when a German passenger boarding KM 180 told the Court that Airport security discovered he had retained his hotel key, which was then returned to its rightful owners.

If Luqa authorities managed to detect the small concealed hotel key, it is more than reasonable to assume they would also have detected the large brown Samsonite suitcase, allegedly being dragged across the airport tarmac by the two Libyan "Secret Agents". The famous Maltese clothes shop, alleged provider of the clothing allegedly bought to wrap "the bomb" in. Owner Tony Gauci has already formally identified two entirely different men as the supposed purchaser.

Week 12: Having failed to convince a large number of skeptical Maltese "witnesses" to attend the Court last week, the Crown was not prepared to give up on its vital quest to draw completely irrelevant and spurious links between Malta, and the bombing of Pan Am 103 more than 1,000 nautical miles to the north in Scotland.

German witnesses Birgit Seliger and Evelin Steinwandt took the stand to testify they both checked in baggage and boarded Air Malta Flight KM 160 at Luqa on 21 December 1988, then disembarked at Frankfurt and collected their baggage. Were the ladies booked to travel from Frankfurt on the Pan Am 103 feeder flight? No, they were not. Well then, was Ms Seliger or Ms Steinwandt's baggage lost en-route, or did one or both perhaps have critical information about the accused Libyans? No on both counts. Just like poor Mr Ferrugia last week, the bottom line is that Birgit Seliger and Evelin Steinwandt were flown to Holland and accommodated at British taxpayer expense, simply to tell the Court they flew out of Malta aboard an Air Malta Boeing 737 on the same day as the crash of Pan Am flight 103 at Lockerbie.

Those readers believing that the prosecution lawyers have finally lost their marbles, would only be partly correct. Though calling Ferrugia, Seliger and Steinwandt has absolutely nothing to do with the guilt or innocence of the two Libyan accused, or with due legal process, the bizarre procedure has everything to do with neuro linguistics and psychological flooding.
In the twilight world of the establishment media and intelligence agencies, reality can be turned on its ear and even reversed by "flooding" the Court and public alike with so much inaccurate information about a single subject, all eventually believe it to be true. The harsh reality is that there are no proven links between Malta and Pan Am 103 at Lockerbie at all, but who would believe this to be true with Ferrugia, Seliger and Steinwandt being paraded before the court?

There is an odds-on chance the prosecution knew in advance that many of the Maltese witnesses would probably refuse to attend. So why call them? The answer lies in human perception. The prosecution hoped the Court and public would perceive that the Maltese witnesses refused to attend because they have something to hide, and those who have something to hide are automatically guilty! Those readers interested in pursuing these disgusting techniques, should read Professor Noam Chomsky's excellent book "Manufacturing Consent", a vivid and comprehensive expose of media and other social engineering methods.

Court attention was then switched from Malta to Frankfurt in Germany, with a range of witnesses called to explain airport security and the baggage handling systems. Principal witnesses were Martin Huebner, Pan Am's security chief for Eastern Europe, and Joachim Koscha, who worked for the Frankfurt Baggage Section during 1988. Koscha described how the baggage system worked, and described the journey of baggage from various coding stations. At this stage the attention of informed observers is once again drawn to the irrelevant nature of the prosecution testimony.

The Crown is attempting to show that a piece of baggage, the suitcase containing the bomb, was transferred from Flight KM 180 arriving from Malta on to Pan Am 103a, the first leg of the doomed 103 flight which blew up over Lockerbie, but how can general statements about Frankfurt security and baggage handling help in proving (in any way at all) that the two Libyan accused are guilty of bombing Pan Am 103?

The Scottish Court is not a rerun of "The Holocaust", where emotional and sometimes hysterical 50 year-old eyewitness testimony alone can be used to imprison "suspects" for life. Fortunately for the two accused Libyans, under Scottish Law the prosecution is required to produce hard evidence of guilt, which to date it has completely failed to do. Does the prosecution have verified video footage of the Libyans constructing the bomb? No it does not.

Does the prosecution have verified photographic or written evidence (in their own handwriting) proving the two Libyans were in any way connected with the bombing of Pan Am 103 at Lockerbie? No it does not. All the prosecution has is unsubstantiated hearsay from a number witnesses, many with vested interests, especially American double-agent Jiacha, who is personally set to become eight million dollars richer if he can stitch up Megrahi and Fhimah. he Show Trial of the Century trial will resume next Tuesday at 9.45 a.m.

Week 13: As before, the prosecution continued to try and convince the court that there really was a flight KM 180 from Malta to Frankfurt on 21 December 1988. Having finally persuaded some of the (mostly reluctant) Maltese to take the stand, the prosecution produced witnesses Bonello, Camilleri, Co, Fricke, and later Iaia, with a flourish. All agreed they had flown from Malta to Frankfurt that day, so the flight really did take off as listed in the Air Malta timetable, Luqa International Airport Air Traffic Logs etc etc. Great news! Of course none of these witnesses knew or were questioned about either of the two accused Libyans, but what the heck, it's only British taxpayers money being squandered at Camp Zeist, isn't it?

Enter a slightly bemused Khalil Lahoud, captain of the mysterious Air Malta Flight KM 180. Perhaps the good Captain knew the accused Libyans? Well, no, actually he did not. Captain Lahoud was then asked what altitude he flew KM 180 at en-route to Frankfurt, and he responded it was either 31 or 35 thousand feet. Sensing that a pilot who couldn't remember exactly where he was 4,230 days ago probably had something to hide, the prosecution pounced. Poor Captain Lahoud was then asked a large number of questions about his actual altitude and time to climb.

Riveting stuff with plenty of flair from the highly-paid lawyers, but of absolutely no relevance to the guilt or innocence of accused Libyans Megrahi and Fhima. On a more sinister note, witness Albert Camilleri testified to examining Semtex explosive found at Ghallis Tower in Malta during 1986. Aha! This explosive was covered with the fingerprints of the Libyan accused? Well, no it was not. The Semtex was just Semtex found in Malta two years before the crash of Pan Am 103, thereby artfully roping Malta into the loop as a "Guilty Terrorist State" alongside Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya.

Just to set the record straight and to prove that Malta is not unique in terms of its covert stock of Semtex, perhaps the prosecution will now consider calling a few witnesses from the Metropolitan Police Service in London. All will cheerfully attest that Semtex has also been found in Britain on a number of occasions.

For any such even-handedness we will have to wait for a while. Exhausted by its endeavors, the Court will now adjourn so that everyone can go and play a round of golf at Saint Andrews. Well, everyone apart from the two accused Libyans of course, who will be forced to remain in the cells at Camp Zeist, despite the fact that not one iota of hard evidence has been presented against them. The Trial of the Century resumes on 22 August 2000

Week 17: After ten years in exile as a paid guest of the American Central Intelligence Agency, the time is fast approaching for double agent Jiacha to start earning his elaborate room and board. But this prosecution star turn of the "Trial of the Century", is already causing severe heartburn at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands.

As may be expected the CIA is trying to beat this event up for all it is worth, and is currently in the throes of psyching-up the defence team with "blacked out" sections of memos from its field agents in Malta to Langley Headquarters in Virginia. The Crown team has seen the full content of the memos of course, and says the blacked-out bits are nothing for the defence to worry about. They are certainly correct in stating there is nothing in the memos for the defence to worry about, but there is a principle at stake here. The defence has demanded to see the blacked-out bits and the Judge has agreed - leading to frantic activity in Langley designed to look like reluctant consent on the part of the CIA to let the defence view American "National Security" secrets.

Bravo! Lawyer performance to date is the equal of anything ever produced in Hollywood, though Jiacha may wish to secure the Oscar for "Best Clown". When required to confront the defence lawyers, Jiacha did so wearing dark sunglasses and a long (rather sexy) Shirley Bassey wig. But who am I to be critical? This double agent is playing the Camp Zeist Casino for a US$4,000,000 jackpot, and protecting his identity is probably important for the future - if Jiacha actually has a future of course, which seems doubtful..

Bearing in mind that Jiacha is already on the record as "never having overheard any actual plans for the accused to blow up an airplane", just what could the sinister blacked-out sections of the CIA memos contain? There are rumors that one contains an order from an American agent for a Pastrami on Rye from a local Maltese sandwich shop, but it doesn't really matter what the memos say, not one of them can provide a trace of hard evidence linking the accused to (a) a bomb and (b) to Pan Am 103.

The entire reason for the memos is identical to so much of the other fatally flawed "evidence" in this case - a psychological ploy designed to convince the media and casual observers that the memos are actually important. After all, would high-powered lawyers fight each over this material if it was not of critical importance to the case? Sadly the answer is yes they would, in fact yes they are, despite the reality that the memos are of absolutely no relevance to the bombing of Pan Am 103.

To fill in court time, a Maltese police inspector took the stand to again recount the story of some standard Semtex high-explosive found at Ghallis Towers, Malta, during 1986. This was not of any relevance to the current case, but allowed the prosecution to once more hint that Malta might be a "guilty terrorist state". The crucial new scientific proof presented on the Semtex-high explosive is that (wait for it, wait for it.......!!) the explosive was found wrapped at Ghallis Towers in LIBYAN newspapers printed during November and December 1980. Nail-biting stuff..

Well that's it then, isn't it? Clearly only Libyans could possible purchase Libyan newspapers, meaning Libyans must have planted the anonymous Semtex at Ghallis Towers in 1986, meaning in turn the Libyans intended to blow up Pan Am 103 with a different batch of Semtex sometime during late 1988, perhaps. Very tenuous I agree, but how else is an increasingly desperate prosecution team supposed to stitch up two innocent men?

Mid week saw the defence trying to deflect attention away from Malta and Germany by seeking to demonstrate flaws in the Heathrow security system, the implication being that the bomb may have been loaded there instead. While this is probably a legitimate technique in terms of casting doubt on the official story (that the accused bombed-up KM 180 in Malta), it can never prove that a bomb was placed aboard Pan Am 103 in London.

Once again we are concentrating on Samsonite suitcases and baggage handlers, when it has already been proved in court that the Mach Stem Effect was miscalculated by the British authorities after the crash. For those readers who have forgotten or not heard about this critical evidence, proper calculations carried out in Munich later proved the Centre of the blast was very close to the aircraft fuselage skin, certainly not inside a suitcase placed inside a baggage container.

In order to place the explosive charge close up against the fuselage, it is first necessary to strip away the wall lining of the forward cargo hold, a task that can only be carried out at second-line servicing level, certainly not on the ramp at LHR or any other airport. So why all of this expensive timewasting with Samsonite suitcases, London Airport Heathrow and "security experts"? The only reasonable assumption is that "the show must go on" regardless, and in spite of terminal damage to prosecution credibility.

Later in the week the prosecution once more provided multiple confirmations that Air Malta KM 180 actually did fly between Malta and Frankfurt on 21 December 1988. Witnesses Poke, Klauss, Backman and Greasefeller all testified they checked in at Malta and flew to Frankfurt. Did any then transfer to Pan Am 103a (the feeder Boeing 727) or Pan Am 103? No they did not. Did any of them know the accused or have any relevant information pertaining to the accused? No they did not. One would think by now that the entire world believes KM 180 actually did fly from Malta to Frankfurt on 21 December 1988, and there is no need for the Crown to waste further taxpayer funds trying to draw a mischievous connection between an innocent airline and country, and the bombing of Pan Am 103 at Lockerbie in Scotland.

Week 21: Another wasted week with lawyers fighting each other over trivialities. Outside the Court, the media starts to highlight the "Palestinians might have done it" theory, courtesy of the Mossad. The Jewish State likes to have an extra suspect "Moslem Sponsor of Terrorism" in the bag wherever possible.

Week 22: After arriving at Camp Zeist surrounded by enough security escorts to do credit to an American President, double agent Jiacha (Giaka) was quickly shown up to be the liar he was long assumed to be. Unable to look the two accused Libyans in the eye, Jiacha stumbled through his "evidence" with almost indecent haste, before scuttling back to his American hideaway to lick his wounds.

The fact Jiacha was ever taken into the Witness Protection Program at all, proves American authorities never expected Libya to release its two citizens for trial. As this week in court showed only too well, the CIA knew the man completely lacked credibility, had no hard evidence to present, and at best served as a mute threat designed to direct hostility towards Libya. For so long as the heavily-protected Jiacha could be mentioned at American press conferences, the western public was persuaded to believe that Libya might have been involved in the bombing of Pan Am 103. After all, who would spend all of that money protecting a witness if he was worthless?

Evidently the CIA and FBI decided this was a worthy way of spending taxpayer funds, but their carefully manufactured illusion of Jiacha's worth was finally destroyed at Camp Zeist in less than two days.

So what "evidence" did this star witness at the Trial of the Century produce? Well, apparently the two accused showed him some blocks of TNT is a desk drawer in Malta, though of course Jiacha has no independent confirmation of this. And most damning of all, Jiacha claimed to have seen one of the accused carry a brown hard-shell Samsonite towards Air Malta Flight KM 180 on the day of the Pan Am crash. Surprise! Both accused worked for Libyan Arab Airlines and carrying suitcases went with the territory. Even if one of the accused did in fact handle a suitcase of this description on the day, so what? Brown hard-shell Samsonites were probably the most common of all suitcases during the early eighties, and my family alone has three of them here at the house.

I could ramble on for pages detailing the way in which both the CIA and FBI tried to sway public opinion and deceive the court, but cannot see any point in doing so. As an observer, it seems to me that Jiacha's physical appearance in the court has finally brought home to the Trial Judges the way in which certain elements of the American and British establishments have tried to use the judicial system for their own ends. Hopefully then, Jiacha's appearance at Camp Zeist marks the beginning of the end of this incredibly expensive farce.

Jiacha has passed his use-by date and the American authorities will have to decide what do with him. Perhaps like so many in the past Jiacha will have an unfortunate fatal accident, or perhaps his rumoured departure for Cairo will become reality. Whatever happens, it seems most unlikely Jiacha will be a burden on American taxpayers for very much longer.
Week 23: Another wasted week. Media speculation that Mohammed Talb might take the stand. Further explanation of the "Palestinian Connection".

Week 24: Prosecution asks for an adjournment to examine exciting new evidence from a third party country (not America). The identity of this "country in the Middle East" is very obviously too secret to pass on to the public.

Week 25: Another adjournment, no kidding! Lawyers disappear to play golf.

Week 26: Court once again adjourned with taxpayer meter running. Lawyers still playing golf, Libyan suspects locked in cells.

Week 27: Just when you thought the whole thing was over and the minstrels were packing their instruments away at Camp Zeist, the prosecution suddenly pounced. Pounced on exactly what you ask? Well no-one really knows just yet, but whatever it is requires the use of Serb-Croat translators and the apparent involvement of at least one more country in the middle east. The BBC, never a very reliable (or accurate) source put it this way:

"More time for Lockerbie defence"

"The Lockerbie trial has been adjourned for another week to allow inquiries to continue into new evidence which could be highly significant to the outcome of the case. The Scottish Court in the Netherlands reconvened for a short time on Tuesday morning before rising again, the fourth such postponement. The adjournment will give the defence team more time to investigate a dossier of material handed to the prosecution by an unnamed government on 4 October.

William Taylor QC, representing Al Megrahi, told the judges another week was needed to continue the investigation. He said this included inquiries into allegations of links between the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and a country in the Middle East not so far linked to the case.
Lawyers in Tripoli were now opening lines of inquiry in "another Middle Eastern state" in an attempt to secure access to evidence there.

Inquiries were also going on in "another European country", which has so far been unconnected with the Lockerbie inquiry. These required the assistance of Serbo-Croat translators, he disclosed. Mr Taylor said that the new information established links, unknown until now, between German intelligence services and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command, an organization which was originally high on the list of Lockerbie suspects."

Interim Analysis

This is getting really exciting, right? Wrong! With entire western governments and media outlets slagging off every Arab and/or Moslem country in the Middle East as a "Sponsor of Terrorism", how long do you really believe the prosecution would keep the lid on the identity of this splendid new disinformation source. Five minutes, perhaps ten? Certainly not any longer.

So what we are looking for is "another Middle Eastern state" which is credible to western governments and media, and can remain anonymous for more than three weeks during the Trial of the Century at Camp Zeist. Apart from good old Israel I can't think of a single one. The Serb-Croat connection is a nice touch - perhaps the Mossad has suddenly decided to go multicultural and multilingual, a complete break with its normal racist policies. Oh well, desperate times call for desperate measures! Serb-Croat translators suddenly needed in the Court. Really stirring stuff! Why? To speak to some of the Mossad's snouts, apparently.

Week 28: Lawyers huddle over "new" Mossad Lockerbie evidence. Fancy that! the Jews had crucial evidence hidden away for 12 years until the prosecution team was flat on its face and grasping at straws, then they decided to help out a bit. Nice people...

Week 29: First we had American double agent Jiacha peddling lies or order to qualify for a $4 million cash reward, and now we have the notorious Abu Talb, allegedly promised a shorter prison sentence in Sweden if he helps to stitch up the Palestinians. Ye gods, court credibility has sunk to an all time low, hasn't it?

Just about every "expert" in the west has dutifully filed through the court and failed to nail any "Arab Terrorist State" for the bombing of Pan Am 103, so now you are all expected to take the word of a convicted criminal instead. From Reuters:-

" Defence lawyers at the Lockerbie bombing trial tried to chip away at the prosecution case against two Libyans on Tuesday when they cross-examined a key witness with links to a radical Palestinian group. Defence attorney William Taylor asked Mohammed Abu Talb, an Egyptian-born Palestinian serving a life sentence in Sweden for terrorism, whether Palestinians believed the United States was the greatest ally of Israel, Talb replied: "That's correct and we still believe that." "All groups strive to liberate Palestine and create a Palestinian state..."

When he took the stand on Friday, Talb said he was babysitting his children at the time of the bombing. He acknowledged he had links with one of the groups implicated by the defence, the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF). The defence has also accused the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine- General Command (PFLP-GC) of involvement in the attack, for which Libyans Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima and Abdel Basset al-Megrahi are standing trial. The defence questioned Talb about his family background and revealed that members of his wife's family had links to the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian President Yasir Arafat. Well that's it then, isn't it?

Talb belonged to a Palestinian organization dedicate to removing heavy Jewish boots from the necks of Palestinian women and children, and worse still, members of his wife's family indirectly knew Yasir Arafat. Condemned out of his own mouth, so to speak...

What pathetic rubbish! As with the Libyans, there is absolutely no hard evidence of any kind linking the Palestinians to the bombing of Pan Am 103, and there never will be. If Abu Talb were to make some sort of "confession" (which seems most unlikely), it would unquestionably be a fairly desperate attempt to gain his freedom and return to his wife and children. None of us could or would blame him for trying, but equally we must not allow any statements made under applied pressure to be regarded as factual.

There should also be grave doubts about Abu Talb's conviction in Sweden, which was achieved without any hard evidence being presented. What evidence (sic) there was in the Swedish court, relied exclusively on the spoken testimony of others. Curiously, Talb was convicted on only one charge, that of bombing a Jewish synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark, as illustrated by the short extract from the Camp Zeist transcript shown below:

Defence Lawyer: Well, I am puzzled by that answer, you see, because you told me at the beginning that the reason you were in prison just now was in respect of bombing attacks which had taken place in Copenhagen, in Stockholm, and in Amsterdam for which you were responsible in the period of 1985 and 1986.

Abu Talb: That is not correct. The fact that I was charged doesn't mean that I was necessarily there or that I committed these acts. I said that I was charged with committing them.

Defence Lawyer: Well, you were convicted of them, weren't you, and sentenced to life imprisonment?

Abu Talb: That is correct.

Defence Lawyer: And these were in respect of bombings which took place in the years 1985 and 1986, a point at which you say was some three years after you had ceased to be a member of any Palestinian organization.

Abu Talb: I was convicted on one charge only, a bombing in Denmark of a Jewish site, not of anything else. I was convicted even though I was not there, and I did not confess to the crime.

Defence Lawyer: Can you tell me when that bombing of the synagogue was, please.

Abu Talb: If I remember correctly, it was in 1985.

Most of the rest of the transcript shows the lawyers trying to put words into Talb's mouth, which should come as no great surprise to anyone. What is a surprise, however, is the almost desperate way in which the lawyers attempted to force Abu Talb to admit he attended a course in Surface to Air missiles in Russia, long before Pan Am 103 was bombed at Lockerbie. Talb refused to admit any such thing, stating correctly the question was not relevant to the case in hand.

But why oh why Surface to Air missiles? Perhaps one days the defence lawyers will explain their irrational but clearly overwhelming obsession about missiles with the rest of us mere mortals. Super terrorist Abu Talb takes the stand. Lawyers pounce and artfully manage to get Talb to admit he doesn't like Israelis, and thinks they should be kicked out of Palestine. Big deal, so Talb shares a common view with about three million other Palestinians! No hard or even corroborating evidence about anything of course, but there has been no hard or corroborating evidence since the beginning of the trial at Camp Zeist.

Week 30: The prosecution concluded its case against two Libyans accused of the 1988 Lockerbie airline bombing on Monday as one of the defence lawyers appealed for the case to be dropped. The prosecution ended after the court had seen footage of an interview with each of the accused by a U.S. television reporter. A court official read out the transcript of the accused's judicial examination in April. Then Lord Advocate Colin Boyd, the head of the prosecution team, ended his side's arguments with the words "I now close the case for the Crown".

Richard Keen, counsel for Fahima, immediately asked the three Scottish judges to dismiss the case against his client, saying there was in fact no case to answer. The lawyer for Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah is going to argue at the Scottish court in the Netherlands that insufficient evidence has been presented against his client. Next week the court will hear Keen´s motion that there is no case to answer against Mr Fhimah. The judges will be asked to decide on the weight of evidence against him, rather than the quality of the Crown case. There has been no similar move from Megrahi, and there is now speculation he will be the first witness when the defence case begins next week._________________

Week 31: The defence at the Lockerbie trial went through the indictment with a fine tooth comb on Tuesday, saying there was insufficient evidence to convict one of the two Libyans accused of the 1988 bombing. Richard Keen, Fahima's lawyer, said on Tuesday his client had no case to answer.

"In my submission the crucial fact for your lordships to consider is: was the second accused aware that there was an intention to use an explosive device for the destruction of a civil aircraft and the murder of its occupants?" Keen said. "If the second accused was not aware of that objective then he cannot be guilty of conspiracy, he cannot be guilty of murder and he cannot be guilty of the alleged breach of section two of the Aviation Security Act 1982," he said.

Dressed in a navy cap, checked shirt and blue waistcoat, Fahima sat impassively, as he has done throughout the trial, a Scottish police officer to his left, Megrahi to his right as Keen sought to knock down the charges in the indictment. Keen's task is not to challenge the reliability of the evidence, but to demonstrate that, even if credible, it is purely circumstantial and would not link his client to the Lockerbie bombing. If the judges agree that there is no case to answer, Fahima will be acquitted.

Keen listed all the areas of the indictment referring to Fahima and argued there was no evidence whatsoever to show his client ordered timers for use in the bomb, tested explosives in Libya or flew to Malta with a suitcase containing a bomb. Mr Keen referred point by point to the lengthy list of charges against Fhimah, adding there was no evidence to bear out the allegation that he conspired to obtain 20 electronic timers capable of detonating explosive devices from the Swiss firm MEBO.

Likewise, there was "not one jot of evidence" that he was involved in testing the detonators on a special forces exercise in Libya, as alleged in the next part of the indictment, Mr Keen said. "There is not one single piece of evidence to bear out that libel as far as the second accused is concerned in any respect whatsoever...One wonders how he came to be mentioned in that paragraph," Keen said repeatedly as he listed the charges.

Entries in Fhima's diary indicating he had taken luggage tags from Air Malta did not prove a thing, Keen said. The prosecution say the bomb began its journey in Malta's Luqa airport and that the two accused used false luggage tags to load it on a plane bound for Frankfurt. They also allege the two posed as employees of Libyan Arab Airlines and were in fact members of the Libyan intelligence services, assertions also not backed up by evidence, Keen said. There was no evidence to show his client was in Malta on the day of bombing, nor did evidence that Fahima kept explosives in his desk at Luqa airport link him to the blast.

Crown witness Abdul Majid Giaka claimed earlier in the seven-month trial that Fhimah had 10 kilos of TNT explosive in his drawer at the airline offices which were later moved to the Libyan Consulate in Malta. Mr Keen told the special court at Camp Zeist in Holland: "Any explosive had ceased to be in the possession of Fhimah three months or more probably five months before December 21 1988. There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the second accused was a member of the Libyan intelligence services at any time or in any way associated with such a service."

Keen concentrated on disputing evidence relating to the conspiracy charge. Legal experts say there is almost certainly insufficient evidence to convict his client on the murder or aviation security charge -- both of which carry a mandatory life sentence.

Richard Keen QC said: "The crucial fact for consideration is was (Fhimah) aware that there was an intention to use an explosive device for the destruction of a passenger aircraft and murder its occupants? "If he was not aware of that objective, then he cannot be guilty of conspiracy, he cannot be guilty of murder, and he cannot be guilty of the alleged breach of the Aviation Security Act.

Keen said they had to consider one crucial question: "It is not sufficient for guilt to be a rational inference (from the circumstances) if there are other rational hypotheses as well. "If you left a jury to choose between two inferences, they would have to speculate, and that they cannot do," said Mr Keen. Keen and the Prosecutor Alastair Campbell concentrated on evidence relating to the conspiracy charge on the basis that if that failed, the murder and aviation security charges would probably fail as well.

Campbell said Fahima was an ideal ally for Megrahi because of his inside knowledge and access to Luqa airport. He worked as a station manager there for more than five years. "I have identified Fahima's involvement over the period... he was knowingly involved in the completion of a plan," he said. Keen however, disagreed. "What you are being asked to do is infer that a man who wasn't there did, by means we do not know, smuggle a bomb into Luqa airport."

This accurate Reuters account shows the pure futility of the Trial Of The Century, and the continuing shocking waste of vast sums of British taxpayers' funds. But we must muddle on it seems, if only to try and circumstantially fit-up one "Guilty Arab Terrorist State" or another, in a continuing attempt to protect the guilty. Defence rebuts the prosecution, for the first time quite effectively.

Week 32: Lord Sutherland getting visibly annoyed that the documents Mossad claimed were in Syria, had not been delivered to the Court. No big surprise. When Mossad tells you something, invariably the opposite is true. No weeks 33, 34, 35 or 36

Week 37: No magic documents from Syria, so the accused do not take the stand. The prosecution suddenly drops two of the three charges against the accused, and the defence rightly claims they have no case to answer.

Week 38: Defence argues bomb must have been inserted at London Airport Heathrow, thereby neatly sidestepping the obvious probability of insertion at American servicing facilities. Judges retire with truckload of prosecution evidence (sic) to consider verdict. No week 39.

Week 40: Megrahi found guilty. My personal response is best summed up by Professor Robert Black, principal architect of the Lockerbie Trial at Camp Zeist: "I am amazed ! Astonished ! I cannot express my reaction in words. I am stunned. The entire verdict hangs on the edge, upon Gauci´s recognition of Megrahi. They (the judges) have taken the assumption the suitcase came from Malta. They have chosen to ignore all the contradictive evidence and passed on this judgment. This was not the verdict that anyone expected. "_________________

......Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the disaster, expressed his personal belief that Al Megrahi was not guilty.
He told a press conference in Edinburgh: “A lot of people I think have hoped that they have achieved closure by the conviction of Megrahi.
“I think for those of us who have looked carefully at the evidence, and have doubts, we cannot achieve that until we’re quite sure that it really is true and it could be proved that it were true that he was the one that did it.”

......Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the disaster, expressed his personal belief that Al Megrahi was not guilty.
He told a press conference in Edinburgh: “A lot of people I think have hoped that they have achieved closure by the conviction of Megrahi.
“I think for those of us who have looked carefully at the evidence, and have doubts, we cannot achieve that until we’re quite sure that it really is true and it could be proved that it were true that he was the one that did it.”

It is humbling to see Jim Swire & the Jersey Widows apply such refreshing discernment to the events of Pan Am 103 & 9/11 respectively. Those who purport to represent the interests of 7/7 victims would do well to take note that 'closure' is not necessarily achieved by simply pasting blame on the unfortunate patsies of official conspiracy theories!

One aspect of GB's cabinet is the lack of maturity or financial/intellectual indepedence; so little chance that the new Home Secretary is going to re-visit any of her predecessors lies and obfuscation ... no doubt they'll all be claiming the credit for averting another 7/7 type event in tomorrow's propaganda sheets and increasing the calls for 90 day detention without charges!!

It is becoming increasingly evident that there are two parallel versions of reality existing alongside each other ... one of which is based entirely upon smoke, mirrors and a prostituted media!

The good news is that as each day goes by, more and more people are seeing through the illusion.

This appears to be the thread with the most extensive look at the whole Lockerbie investigation, so I thought I'd post with this info:

News release: August 3, 2007

The following is an important email received today from Mr. Edwin Bollier where he informs the authorities and the public that an ex-employee of his company, MEBO TELECOMMUNICATIONS, has recently confessed in a signed affidavit (posted below) that he stole a MEBO timer, together with documentation and a circuit print, and passed these items over to Scottish police, thereby enabling them to complete a conspiracy to frame Libya as a responsible party in the bombing of Pan Am 103.

You will find two important documentaries. One by CBS "60 Minutes" and the other by Channel 4 "Dispatches". These two documentaries will explain in detail the identification discrepancies between the MST-13 timer fragment that was allegedly discovered in the Lockerbie debris field, and the commercially produced MST-13 timer circuit board sold to Libya. These discrepancies were ignored by the five Scottish judges during the Lockerbie trial.

These three stories about Lockerbie appeared in the Scottish press this week. Looks like the pack of lies the government sold us is starting to collapse like a house of cards. The fact that the victims families have put their money to support the appeal of the convict speaks volumes.
I have not posted this to score any cheap points against Shayler but we all know he is a committed advocate of the official story, which is collapsing fast.

FBI offered me $4m: Lockerbie bomb witness
MICHAEL HOWIE
HOME AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT (mhowie@scotsman.com)
A WITNESS in the Lockerbie case has claimed he was offered $4 million (£2 million) by American investigators to lie to the trial judges.

Edwin Bollier, head of the Swiss company MEBO that was said to have manufactured the timer used to detonate the Pan Am bomb, claims he was offered the money by the FBI at its Washington HQ in exchange for making a statement that supported the main line of inquiry - that Libya was responsible for the bombing.

He has told Dr Hans Koechler, who was a UN observer during the trial of Abelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi in the Netherlands, that he was offered a "new life" in the United States if he testified that the timer found in the plane wreckage had been supplied to Libya.

"I rejected this and said this could not possibly be the case," he said. He added that there was a "loud dispute" after he rejected the offer.

The claim follows news that the Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, whose evidence led to Megrahi's conviction, was offered $2 million by the CIA

Lockerbie evidence withheld from defence
FRESH doubt has been cast over the conviction of the Lockerbie bomber after it emerged a document containing vital evidence about the bomb timer has never been shown to the defence.

The Scotsman has learned that the failure to disclose the classified document, which concerns the supply of timers identical to the one said to have been used to blow up Pan Am Flight 103, led a review body that examined the case against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi to conclude a miscarriage of justice may have occurred.

It was not previously known that doubts over the timer were grounds for an appeal. The content of the document remains a mystery as sensitive details of the report seen by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) have been blacked out, or redacted. It is understood that security services also prevented the SCCRC from releasing the report, or disclosing any of its contents, to Megrahi or his lawyers, who are thought likely to seek a court order forcing the Crown Office to hand it over.

The document is among six points in the case which the SCCRC has concluded casts doubt over the reliability of Megrahi's conviction. The SCCRC detailed some of these in a summary of its findings in June, but others, including the failure to disclose this document, remained secret.

However, disclosure, or the lack of it, has already been exposed as one of the concerns of the SCCRC, which has ruled a fresh appeal must be heard. Among the grounds for a potential miscarriage of justice was the discovery of new evidence, not made available to the defence, that casts doubt over the reliability of the identification by Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci of Megrahi as the man who bought clothes found wrapped around the bomb used to blow up the plane, murdering 259 passengers and crew on board the plane, and 11 town residents.

The evidence showed that four days before Mr Gauci picked the Libyan out in an identity parade, the witness saw a photograph of him in a magazine linking him to the bombing.

The Lockerbie trial is one of several cases in which the prosecution has been shown to have withheld potentially vital evidence from the defence.

Last July, Stuart Gair was cleared after spending 17 years protesting his innocence over a murder involving a knife.

His conviction was quashed after Lord Abernethy singled out a failure to disclose witness statements to his lawyers deprived the defence of a "powerful argument" on identification.

In December, four brothers accused of murder were freed by the High Court in Glasgow after the Crown failed to provide more than 100 witness statements to the defence.

The hidden evidence in the Lockerbie case relates to the timer said to have detonated the bomb. It was identified by a fragment of circuit board said to have been found in the remains of a shirt among the debris.

The timers were said to have been supplied only to Libya. But then it was shown at least two had also been supplied to the East German Stasi.

Last night neither the SCCRC or Megrahi's lawyer, Tony Kelly, were prepared to comment.

Tam Dalyell, the former MP who believes Megrahi is innocent, said: "At issue now is whether there should be a challenge to the Crown Office."

POINTS FOR APPEAL
SIX years on from the landmark trial, the matter of who was responsible for the Lockerbie bombing remains unresolved.

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission identified six aspects of the case against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi where it believes that "a miscarriage of justice may have occurred". One of those related to the day that clothes believed to have been wrapped around the bomb were bought from a shop in Malta.

The court had accepted the Crown's position that the clothes were bought on 7 December, 1988, when there was evidence that Megrahi had been on the island. But the commission found there was "no reasonable basis" for the judges to reach this conclusion.

It also said that new evidence, not heard at the trial, together with the testimony of the shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, indicated the items were bought before 6 December, when Megrahi was not on the island.

Swire offered cash help to al-Megrahi
MARCELLO MEGA

THE father of a Lockerbie bombing victim made an astonishing £500,000 offer to help free the Libyan accused of his daughter's murder.

Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the December 1988 atrocity, offered part of his compensation cash to lawyers trying to prove the innocence of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, currently serving life in Greenock Prison.

Swire last night told Scotland on Sunday he had unwittingly contributed to a miscarriage of justice by helping to persuade Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi that Megrahi would receive a fair trial under the Scottish legal system.

Swire revealed he is now actively campaigning for Megrahi's release. It is understood he has held meetings with First Minister Alex Salmond to try to persuade him to set up a public inquiry into the affair.

Flora was among the 270 Lockerbie victims. Megrahi was found guilty and sentenced to life but he has been granted a second appeal after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission decided earlier this year his conviction was unsafe on six key grounds.

Swire has previously made it clear that he believes Megrahi is innocent of the crime and it is known he visited the Libyan in Greenock jail. But remarkable new details have now emerged of the extent to which Swire is fighting to have Megrahi returned to his family.

Sources close to the defence team said the offer of financial help was made in 2005, shortly after Swire and his wife Janet had dinner with Eddie McKechnie, who was at the time Megrahi's lawyer. According to the sources, McKechnie was downhearted by the drying up of financial support from Libya for Megrahi's defence. The Swires had their own overwhelming concern: the recovery of their son William from treatment for a brain tumour.

But that did not stop Swire offering McKechnie £500,000 if it was needed to keep Megrahi's defence team in operation. The money was to be paid from the compensation the Swires were due to be paid by Libya, estimated at £2m per family.

As events turned out, the Swires did not hand over a penny. Shortly after the discussions, McKechnie was replaced by another lawyer, Tony Kelly, and the funds started to flow again from Libya.

A source said: "That they were willing to make it underlines their commitment to doing all they can to see justice done in the case, and also tells you clearly what they think of the guilty verdict against Megrahi. It was an incredible offer from a man who you might expect would have nothing but anger and contempt for Megrahi."

As well as pressing Salmond for a public inquiry, Swire is in constant contact with Westminster politicians and fellow campaigners including Tam Dalyell.

Swire declined to discuss his offer of financial help to Megrahi's defence, but admitted: "When Megrahi goes home, I will feel a great weight off my shoulders. I might be overstating the significance of it, but I travelled to Libya three times to meet with their leader, Colonel Gaddafi, and I assured him that he could entrust the two Libyan citizens accused of the bombing to the Scottish criminal justice system.

"I witnessed every piece of evidence in the court at Zeist and I don't believe for one moment Megrahi was guilty. I also witnessed at first hand the sleight of hand and deceit of the legal system Megrahi had been entrusted to. I was and remain embarrassed and angry. I feel a personal burden on my shoulders.

"Megrahi languishes in Greenock Prison, an innocent man, and his wife and family, who had moved to Scotland, have had to return to Libya for the sake of the children."

James Swire wrote:

I shook his hand when we met, which I could not have done if there was a shred of doubt in my mind of his innocence.

He showed gratitude for my support. He has never shown any evidence of bitterness that I played a part in bringing him to this sorry pass. In fact, he has never shown any trace of bitterness or resentment over his predicament. He is very quick to show gratitude for my continuing efforts to support him. He is a very dignified man.

The trial was a blatant miscarriage of justice, what between the prosecutuon witholding evidence and the CIA trying to bribe people to lie. It was purely political trial, with the Americans interfering and corrupting evidence. They were determined to gaol a Libyan, regardless of the truth.

Like more recent actions, the trial has dragged the good name of Scottish justice into the mire, and has been a national disgrace.

The sooner the appeal is heard, and an innocent man is freed, the better._________________

Lockerbie has some inportant parallels with things that have happened since such as 7/7 for example. There is no evidence to have drafted a case against any of the four alleged bombers yet now associates of the four are being tried for conspiracy.
Lockerbie as with 7/7 - victims families do not believe the government's story which is built on a pack of lies.
i mean what kind of evidence is it that a guy bought a suit in a shop in Malta and this guy looks like the accused.
No such evidence as to how he might have got the bomb on board the plane or any normal evidence.

I hope the truth does come out about Lockerbie because it will hopefully help expose the truth about 7/7 as well._________________

Robert Fisk: Do you know the truth about Lockerbie?
I urge anyone who is aware of government lies over Flight 103 to come forward
Published: 13 October 2007

After writing about the "ravers" who regularly turn up at lectures to claim that President Bush/the CIA/the Pentagon/Mossad etc perpetrated the crimes against humanity of 11 September, I received a letter this week from Marion Irvine, who feared that members of her family run the risk of being just such "ravers" and "voices heard in the wilderness". Far from it.

For Mrs Irvine was writing about Lockerbie, and, like her, I believe there are many dark and sinister corners to this atrocity. I'm not at all certain that the CIA did not have a scam drugs heist on board and I am not at all sure that the diminutive Libyan agent Megrahi – ultimately convicted on the evidence of the memory of a Maltese tailor – really arranged to plant the bomb on board Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988.

But I take Mrs Irvine's letter doubly seriously because her brother, Bill Cadman, was on board 103 and died in the night over Lockerbie 19 years ago. He was a sound engineer in London and Paris, travelling with his girlfriend Sophie – who, of course, was also killed – to spend Christmas with Sophie's aunt in the United States. Nothing, therefore, could be more eloquent than Mrs Irvine's own letter, which I must quote to you. She strongly doubts, she says, Libya's involvement in the bombing.

"We have felt since the first days in December 1988," she writes, "that something was being hidden from us ... the discrediting of the Helsinki (US embassy) warning, the presence of the CIA on Scottish soil before the work of identifying bodies was properly undertaken, the Teflon behaviour of ministers and government all contributed to a deep feeling of unease.

"This reached a peak when my father was told by a member of the American Presidential Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism that our government knew what had happened but that the truth would not come out. In the truth vacuum, the worst-case scenario – that lives were sacrificed in expiation for the Iranian lives lost in June 1988 – takes on a certain degree of credibility. The plane was brought down in the last dangerous moments of the Reagan presidency."

Now I should explain here that the Iranian lives to which Mrs Irvine refers were the Iranian passengers of an Airbus civilian airliner shot down over the Gulf by a US warship a few months before Lockerbie and before the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.

The USS Vincennes – nicknamed Robocruiser by the crews of other American vessels – blasted its missiles at the Airbus on the assumption that it was a diving Iranian air force jet. It wasn't – and the Airbus was climbing – but Reagan, after a few cursory apologies, blamed Iran for the slaughter, because it had refused to accept a UN ceasefire in the war with Iraq in which we were backing our old friend Saddam Hussein (yes, the same!).

The US navy also awarded medals – god spare us – to the captain of the Vincennes and to his gunnery crew. Some weeks later the boss of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command – a pro-Iranian Palestinian outfit in Lebanon – suddenly called a press conference in Beirut to deny to astonished reporters that he was involved in Lockerbie.

Why? Was he being fingered? Was Iran? Only later did those familiar "official sources" who had initially pointed the finger at Iran start blaming Libya. By then we needed the support of Iran's ally Syria and Iranian quiescence in our attempt to liberate Kuwait after Saddam's 1990 invasion. Personally, I always thought that Lockerbie was revenge for the Airbus destruction – the PLP's strange press conference lends credence to this – which makes sense of Mrs Irvine's courageous letter.

Her parents, Martin and Rita Cadman, have, she says, had countless meetings with MPs, including Tam Dalyell and Henry Bellingham, Cecil Parkinson, Robin Cook and Tony Blair, and with Nelson Mandela (whose appeal for Megrahi to be transferred to a Libyan prison was supported by the Cadmans).

In a poignant sentence, Mrs Irvine adds that her parents "are ageing and in their anxiety that they will die with no one having taken real responsibility for their son's death are in danger of losing focus and feeling that they themselves are 'raving'. The (1980-8 war in Iraq meant that no lessons were being learned, and because my brother chanced to be on that plane we all now feel a heightened sense of responsibility for the world situation".

Then Mrs Irvine comes to the point. "What can we do? Now that my father is older and it is up to us, the next generation, to try to needle the government, but is there any hope? I am writing to ask if you think there is any reasonable action that we can take that has a slight prospect of success ... a refusal to understand and admit to the past is dangerous for the future."

I couldn't put it better myself – and I do have a very direct idea. If official untruths were told about Lockerbie – if skulduggery was covered up by the British and US governments and lies were told by those responsible for our security – then many in authority know about this.

I urge all those who may know of any such lies to write to me (snail mail or hand-delivered) at The Independent. They can address their letters to Mrs Irvine in an envelope with my name on it. In other words, this is an appeal for honest whistle-blowers to tell the truth.

I can hear already the rustle of the lads in blue. Are we encouraging civil servants to break the Official Secrets Act? Certainly not. If lies were told, then officials should let us know, since the Official Secrets Act – in this case – would have been shamefully misused to keep them silent. If the truth has indeed been told, then no one is going to break the Official Secrets Act.

So I await news. Ravers need not apply. But those who know truths which cannot be told can have the honour of revealing them all. It's the least Martin and Rita Cadman and Mrs Irvine – and Bill and Sophie – deserve. As for a constabulary which just might be tempted to threaten me – or Mrs Irvine – in a quest for truth, to hell with them._________________

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